Europe 2009: Aftermath

Now for a set of miscellaneous wrap-up topics, about what has happened since I got back and stuff that I forgot to mention earlier.

My bronchial cough has really been nasty all week, although I’m on my usually “onions and honey” home remedy.  It is definitely improving, but I’ve been very low energy.  (The remedy: chop up a strong onion into dime-sized pieces and place in a Mason jar, then fill to covering the onions with honey.  Put on the lid and store for 8-12 hours.  Decant an ounce — a shot glass full — of the now thin and smelly honey and drink it.  Tastes awful, try not to breathe in as you drink!  Take further shots morning and night until what remains is too thick to deal with.  Strain out the now-desiccated onions after 24–36 hours.  Works about as well and fast as a Z-Pack of antibiotics, and it’s both cheaper and you can make it up right away rather than waiting until your doctor can arrange to see you four days from now.  Now and then, I have to do a second batch, but I’ve had to do that with a Z-Pack before, too.)

The medals from the OutGames are disks with the center cut out, and they are hung around the neck on a cord looped through the center.  When my boyfriend saw it, he said it looked like a Chinese coin.  I had a flash of insight and fetched one of my leftover Danish coins — a disk with the center cut out.  Ah ha!

A week later and the cough is still around.  Mostly out of the chest, but up in the head.  Completely knocked me out on Sunday evening, such that I slept (or at least dozed) 12 hours.  So I finally broke down and called the doctor, and they phoned in a Z-Pack prescription.  Here’s hoping it helps.  (Another week later and there are still traces of the cough, and probably will be for another couple weeks.  But it’s tolerable, down to only one or two cough drops a day now.)

In the Amsterdam Centrum, I had noticed that most of the limited parking for cars was right along the canal edge, without either a curb or a railing to mark the edge.  It would give me the heebie-jeebies to park like that, so easy to go a few inches too far and edge up in the canal.  And then just after I got back to the States, I chanced upon this entry from Schott’s Vocab blog, about Smart cars ending up in the canals in Amsterdam.

In Berlin, I found a little music store and went looking for some European country music.  Didn’t find any of that — it was a mostly Classical music store, which is probably why most of their country selection was from the Johnny Cash era, with very little current country and nothing that wasn’t American.  But I did end up buying a Greatest Hits CD from Buck Owens, whom I have little from, and it was a Japanese import to boot.  (So let’s see: I spent €5 to purchase American country music from the 1960s imported to Germany from Japan.  Sounds par for the course.)

Between my medals from the OutGames, my medals from the 1st World OutGames a few years ago, and other medals from dance competitions, I’m acquiring quite a few, to the point that I can’t really display them effectively.  (Nor do I need to display most of them.  Many are generic, without even an indicator of what event they are from, nor what I won them for.)  An idea that comes to mind, given the general size and flatness of the medals, would be to have them embedded in clear plastic, with a floater label on the back indicating when and what they were for, and turn them into coasters.  Probably just the important, unique ones — the OutGames and a couple of the IAGLCWDC competition medals — rather than the whole lot.  Not that I generally need more coasters, having about a dozen already, but that would make the medals both useful and actually displayable, which seems like a great solution.  I think I’ll try visiting TAP Plastics here fairly soon.

I got interviewed by the Seattle Gay News for an article (and picture) on the OutGames.

A week after I got home, some scabs on the top of my head released.  These would have been from repeatedly banging my head on the rafters while getting dressed at the contest.  Guess I did some damage.  Ow.

I seem to have dropped 3–5 pounds on the trip.  That’s a good thing, although I’d still like to lose another 10 lbs. at some point, down to the low 190s.  But it’s hard to complain when you’re back at the weight you were at 10 years ago.

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Updated on February 5, 2010

Updated on May 19, 2010

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/08/europe-2009-aftermath.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam and Copenhagen (Tuesday, July 28)

I had to be up by 8:00 am to catch the train to Schilpol airport, but it turned out the Anco’s breakfast isn’t served until 9:00 am, and indeed the hotel bar are was locked and I didn’t know how to do checkout.  (Much less recover my key deposit.)  Turns out details for that were on a guide in my room that I didn’t read; I have no idea where the guide was, didn’t see it at all.  So I wrote a note with the key and pushed it under the bar door.

Grabbed an orange juice and a pastry of some sort at the HEMA at Centraal Station.  Made it to the airport without incident.  Oh, look!  Starbucks!  Yay, familiar coffee!  But I bypassed it in favor of getting checked in, just in case.  Only checked the one suitcase, so when the big carry-on with my leather in it went through the scanner, they pulled out my chainmail harness and asked what it was.  On the other side of security, there was another Starbucks.  Yay!

Customs in Denmark, was it smooth like in the Netherlands?  Not at all.  By which I mean: not at all.  None.  Didn’t even have to show my passport, other than getting on the plane in Amsterdam.

Fewer signs in Denmark are bilingual than in Amsterdam, even at the airport.  After a few minutes fiddling with the iPhone to figure out what train I might need to take, I had to stand in line at the train ticket counter to get help.  Turned out I wanted Copenhagen Central Station.  Figures.

Long walk on tile and cobblestone paths to the hotel.  I’m getting blisters on my hands from this luggage.  I think it gets heavier each leg.

The hotel room at Cabinn City is… small isn’t the word for it.  It’s about 10–12 foot deep and 8 foot wide; about half-size is how it feels, rather cramped — a walk-in closet.  Two single beds (which I pushed together to make a double.  Modular desk, storage, and closet space.  Bathroom has the shower head in the middle of the ceiling; you pull the curtain around and flip a lever on the sink, and then deal with a wet bathroom floor until it drains/dries.  The whole thing feels very IKEA (although that’s actually in the next country over).

You have to put your room key in a slot by the door to work the lights and outlets; they go out after about 15 seconds if you remove the card.  Took me a while to figure that out, and my laptop ran out of power once despite being plugged in.  Also seems like a great way to leave your card in the room, although it also does prevent big electric bills from lights left on.  (But it also prevents you from leaving a small light on to greet you when you return).

I took a quick shower and booted up the laptop to check out the Scandinavian Leather Men site.  Oh look, that leather club sightseeing tour starts at 14:00, and its now… 1:50 pm (13:50).  Quick, scramble into shorts and shirt and jog over there.  (I chose this hotel because it’s only 10 minutes from both the SLM clubhouse and DGI-byen where the dance competition is being held.)

We then spent about 90 minutes walking through Copenhagen: past the oldest gay bar in the city, by the original Carlsberg brewery location, through the King’s Garden, past the royal palace, down to the water across from the Opera House, and to the new Royal Theatre where we had beer and cider.  There, the rest of the group left for a ferry ride, while I headed back to the Hans Christian Andersen castle at Tivoli to check-in for the OutGames.  Along the way, I bought a basket of blackberries from a street vendor, the only food I had eaten since a pastry about 8 hours earlier.  And then back to the hotel for a nap.

I wanted to get a t-shirt from the OutGames, but they made the (poor, to me) decision to limit different colors to different styles.  The general OutGames design is very loud and busy — dancing silhouettes in front of the multi-colored “bubbles” logo — and I didn’t want it.  I preferred just the single color “bubbles” version (“preferred” meaning “would settle for”; still didn’t like it much), but it was only available in blue or yellow on a black shirt for men; women had two other colors, and another two were only on tanks.  I could have lived with the yellow design, but then the price: 150 DKK ($30) for a t-shirt which I didn’t really like a lot to start with?  No way.

All registered attendees get a participation medal, which they decided to make do double duty as a luggage tag.  This strikes me as very odd: it makes for a pretty heavy luggage tag, and not one that I would want to risk getting yanked off my bag in transit (having had other tags broken, ripped, or lost over the years).  I hope they got a price break by doing this, rather than it costing extra for a nifty but dumb idea.

After the nap, dinner was an egg and tomato sandwich and a creme cheese danish from Upper Crust at the train station.  Cheap and quick.

Tuesday evening was a party at the SLM clubhouse.

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Updated on February 23, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-and-copenhagen.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Monday, July 27)

Today, it was finally time to do some of the traditional touristy things.  I intentionally saved them for Monday, figuring crowds would be smaller.  I trekked down to the Museumplein, where several of the museums are clustered.  The Rijksmuseum is undergoing major construction, so only had a small portion open, and a long line out the door.  (Looks like I’m never supposed to go to that museum, since my last trip here in 1981, it was also closed [due to Liberation Day, I think].)

Heading toward the Van Gogh Museum, I went through the free part of the Coster Diamonds Museum, but opted out of the paid part (€7.50); the ticket booth was all the way through the downstairs, by which point I had got that museum out of my system — I would likely have bought a ticket if they had been sold at the front.

Next was the House of Bols museum, the oldest distillery in Amsterdam and creators of Gen.  Genever (which was dubbed “Dutch Courage”) was copied by the British as Gin.  Bols is best known today for their myriad of fruity liqueurs in bottles shaped like juggling clubs used in “flairtending” (think Tom Cruise in Cocktail).  The bottles were repeatedly said to be designed “by bartenders for bartenders” but they never mentioned the blatantly obvious juggling club antecedents, which was an odd omission.  This tour (€11) ended with a Genever cocktail (I had a Holland House — strong lemon flavor) plus tastings of a couple of the liqueurs (I tried the Dark Cacao and Peppermint).  I bought a spherical Bols shot glass as a souvenir.

The Van Gogh Museum (€13.50) had only a couple people in line, so I paid for this one.  It was good enough, I suppose, with one floor all Van Goghs, arranged by date so as to give a through line of his work.  In the end, I decided I didn’t much care for his work.  The early stuff was incredibly dark (all blacks and browns), much of his middle stuff had such whacked out perspectives that it detracted from the work for me, and his later stuff became more abstract.  Only his flower pieces really hold any enjoyment for me, and I bought a set of espresso cups with his “Butterflies and Poppies” image on them (a painting I don’t think I had ever seen before).  The other two floors were dedicated to some of his contemporaries, none of whose names (other than Gauguin) were familiar to me and none of which I can recall now.  One set of lithographs struck me: a series called “In Dreams” by Odilon Redon, with one image being a floating head with white skin and a huge shock of black hair; almost certainly an inspiration for Morpheus (from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), although I’ve not heard of the connection before.

Passed up at the gift shop: a nifty flower vase made of folded waxed cardboard, which will fold flat or pop out into a double vase with Van Gogh imagery on it.  Too expensive, but I considered it for a Christmas present.

Near the Dam Square, I stopped to get my obligatory Amsterdam t-shirt — black with red print “Amsterdam” and the “XXX” city logo.  (Hmm, I wonder if “triple X” = porn stems from the Red Light District?  Must research.)

(The web has conflicting stories.  One theorizes that since “XX” stands for kiss, and since it was once illegal to kiss a woman in a film more than three times, films that went beyond this limit were labelled “XXX”.  Sounds contrived to me.  Another equates it to the “XXX” on kegs of beer, indicating a level of quality or strength.  I couldn’t find any connection to Amsterdam, to newspaper editorial signoffs, or to shirt sizes.)

I planned to go to the Hash, Marijuana, & Hemp Museum, just a few blocks down canal from the Anco, but passed out for a nap instead.  Dinner was a Chinese place, something bland but with a good bit of veggies which I probably needed.

Unlike many other regional cities — be they European like Dublin or American like Atlanta and Houston and Boston — I had a very hard time detecting a Dutch accent.  I usually hear accents fairly quickly and start adopting them unconsciously within a day or two, but not in Amsterdam.  I guess it’s such a melting pot, especially in the Centrum, that it evens out.  By when I left, the best accent I retained was something that seemed a little Italian tinged, if anything.

Amsterdam’s sidewalks are edged by dark colored curbs, carved (I guess, or maybe molded — hard to tell) and in segments with puzzle-piece interlocks.  Very cool, but they vary in height from an inch or less to about 8 inches.  And probably because of the dark color, my peripheral vision identifies them as “street” rather than “curb”, so I have had a very hard time with them.  I keep suddenly stepping off the curb and onto the actual street.  It’s amazing that I didn’t twist my ankle with the number of times I did this.

Amsterdam also seems to be loaded with steep stairs with shallow steps.  I tried to stumble into the basement at the Argos, and the stairs at the Anco were a trip to get the large suitcase up, since they were shallow, steep, and curved!  Most fascinating were the ones at Mauricio’s apartment, which were about three stories up but only 1.5 deep.  It’s a good thing I already tend to take steps with my foot sideways to increase surface area.  (To make matters worse, I racked my shin on the bed frame at the hotel, and then hit the exact same place going up the stairs at the Argos.)

The weather in Amsterdam has been fantastic, but the humidity has been through the roof.  This made the late night walk on Sunday night terrific, but Sunday was increasingly thick and miserable, turning to rain a little bit.

Amsterdam is incredibly flat.  Reminds me of the drive from Houston to Galveston.  No visible landmarks other than town water towers, unlike the West Coast where we always have mountains to navigate by.  Patrick and Chris told me that I had to go about 100 km outside the city to start getting to some hills.

Amsterdam is loaded with bicycles, especially in the Centrum, where there are 50-100 bikes for every car.  (And none of the mountain bikes or 10-speeds everyone has in the States.  These are either single or 3-speed bikes, and all with bag racks on the back.)  The flatness of the Dutch countryside and the narrow streets in the Centrum are undoubtedly the cause of this, making it reasonably easy to bike anywhere you need to go; I imagine it is also quite expensive to own a car here.  It is quite cool to see the racks of bikes, 50 to 100 or more per rack, every slot full.  There were a number of tandem bikes (that’s a bicycle built for two, Daisy), and I even saw one with four seats, for the entire family.

Beyond the bikes, though, are the scooters and motorcycles, especially the scooters.  Probably 8-10 scooters for every car in the Centrum.  Lots of Vespas, naturally, but I saw Sym and Kymco and Yamaha models, too, and some lines I didn’t recognize.  Apparently no helmet law, either.

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Updated on February 9, 2010

Updated on May 12, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-monday-july-27.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Sunday, July 26)

I’m slowly recovering from jetlag, but today was a day where I didn’t really want to do anything.  Again, wrote the blog posts for an hour after breakfast.

Wandered around a while, then trekked 30 minutes southwest of the Centrum to a party I had been invited to, at a bar called Sameplace.  The further out from the Centrum, the wider and more familiar-to-Americans style the streets became, and the newer the construction.  And though more familiar, there was still a definite “European” feel to things, in an almost stereotypical way.  (All stereotypes are rooted in fact, after all.)

I was wearing one of my kilts, the tan canvas and black leather one from MacLeo.  It got a number of looks, but I trained myself long ago not to make eye contact back on those.  Just let them pass by.

Took the tram (light rail) back to the city; I think the cars are the same design as used in Dublin.  Later that evening, I caught a cab back out to near where the party had been, and later walked back to the Centrum late at night (1:30 am); beautiful weather in the high 60s, me in shorts and tank top.  I got a little lost — went one canal too far — but the iPhone map tool got me back to the hotel.

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Updated on February 8, 2010

Updated on May 3, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-sunday-july-26.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Saturday, July 25)

Struggled myself out of bed at 10:15 for breakfast.  Collapsed back in for two more hours.  Got up and worked on the blog posts and cruised online for an hour while they made up the room.

Trekked a mile or two west, to the Homomonument and Anne Frank House.  Stopped at Dam Square for lunch, at a Bali Chicken stir-fry (with Javanese spices; had a nice heat to it) and found a coffee shop with coffee to go (er, “take away” is the local term).  This wasn’t a pot-serving “coffee shop”.  I still haven’t broached one of those.

The Homomonument surprised me.  The only pics I had seen were of a stone triangle “dock” extending into the canal, but it is one of three triangles in the square at Westermarkt — one raised, one flush with the ground, and the one in the canal (below ground level) — representing past, present, and future.  Not sure that it “works”, but it’s sure more or something honoring gay rights struggles than we’ve got in the States.

Anne Frank House?  Well, I walked past it.  Line down the block.  Didn’t plan to go in anyway, and definitely not for that sort of a wait (probably a couple hours to get in).  I despise waiting lines like that; given the choice between waiting interminably for something and going to the next place, I’ll opt to walk on.  I may never go back to a theme park again (although now with the iPhone, they aren’t so bad, maybe, since I can play games and surf the web while I wait.).

Trekked back to the hotel, then back to the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Web.  Came back to the hotel for a nap, and then some dinner — take-away shoarma (“shawarma” in the US; Lebanese chopped meat) sandwich and frites (fries) with curry, mayo, and onions.  The curry sauce for fries here is red and liquid, like ketchup, as opposed to the yellow gravy in Ireland, which I liked better.  Really wish I could get them with poutine (gravy and cheese) though; had that in Vancouver in April and it was yummy!  Watched a chunk of Men in Black II, then prepped to go out.

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Updated on February 5, 2010

Updated on May 3, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-saturday-july-25.html

Europe 2009: Amsterdam (Friday, July 24)

Customs in Amsterdam was surprising.  Surprising in that it was almost non-existent.  Seriously: I stood in line behind one person, showed my passport to get into the baggage claim (and was asked no questions about my stay), got my bag, walked through the “Nothing To Declare” door, and that was it.  I was done.  I get hassled more than this driving into Canada!

I rode the train from the airport to Amsterdam Centraal Station.  This would have gone smoothly, but I misread the schedule and thought I was on a train that didn’t stop at the two stations in between.  So I got off at the first stop, got out of the station, checked my iPhone map, and said “Where the hell am I?”  (I couldn’t see signage telling me which stop I was at.  Or maybe I just couldn’t read it.)  I had to get back on and ride two more stops.  I chatted for a couple minutes with a nice Dutch girl for a few minutes before the first stop, where she exited.

Lugging my bags to the hotel wasn’t easy, between the bump-bump-bump of the brick streets and the rain.  Good solid rainstorm.  Thank you, leather jacket and leather cowboy hat.  Felt like home (but like spring, not high summer).

I’m staying at the Hotel Anco.  Several years ago, one of the Seattle Men in Leather members (Leo) wrote an article for our newsletter about leather travel in the Netherlands and Belgium, and he recommended the Anco.  For €65 per night, I’ve got a room with a double bed and a sink (shared toilet and shower, one floor up), plus free WiFi and breakfast every morning, and I’m a block from Warmeosstraat.  (I think it was supposed to be a single bed when I made the reservation, but shhh, I’m not telling!)  The classic leather stay in Amsterdam is the Black Tulip (but I haven’t chanced on it yet, not sure just where it is; ah, a web search shows it is closer to Centraal Station than the Anco is), but it was another €20 or more a night.

My room wouldn’t be ready for a couple hours (since it was still morning, about 9:00 am), so I had some breakfast and then wandered around Warmoestraat, where RoB and Mr. B and several of the leather bars are.  Nothing was open at 10:00 am on Friday morning, though.  I wandered over to another neighborhood where a couple more leather bars and gay shops are (also not open yet), and then back to RoB (now open) where I bought a new pair of leather braces (suspenders), for the Mr. Leather OutGames contest.

We’re used to streets in the States which are wide — two lanes plus two lanes of parking — and paved with asphalt.  Here in the Amsterdam Centrum, most of the streets are closer to what we would call alleys, but paved with bricks.  They are often as small as one narrow lane and about 3 feet on each side for walking, and some are narrower than that.  Some of it reminds me of Greenwich Village (maybe no surprise, since New York was originally New Amsterdam), and of Philadelphia.  Of course, the canals cross-cutting everything remind me of last spring’s trip to Dublin, where the river bisects the city, with Temple Bar on one side, kind of like Warmoesstraat and the Red Light District are here.

The Red Light district is between the Anco and Warmoesstraat, or at least a portion of it is, centered around Ould Kerk, the oldest church in Amsterdam.  It is rather bizarre, having full glass doors with whores behind them, gyrating and winking at possible customers in the direct view of the church.  The last time I was in Amsterdam (other than at the airport last year), I was 13 and on a tour.  I think we went through some chunk of the Red Light district on that trip — I saw some tour groups in the area this time, even just after dark — but I don’t really remember anything about that piece of the trip, nearly 30 years later.

Back at the hotel, I got my room and a couple hours nap, then went wandering again.  Found that the Web was open, but the Warmoesstraat bars don’t open until 2200 or 2300 (10 or 11 pm)!  They stay open unto 4 or 5 am, but that late of an opening seems very strange.

Somewhere tonight, I lost my nose ring.  (Probably in the dark room at the Eagle.) Beautiful little crescent (no balls) from Palm Springs Piercing.  It’s held in by two rubber rings, but I only had one on (“Danger, Will Robinson!”), because I only have three and the others were on my other, larger crescent ring.  Which I had forgotten I was wearing on Monday when I got to work, so I took it out and put it in my shorts pocket, then put them through the wash, and… guess what didn’t come back out on Tuesday.  Fuck, that leaves me with just the nose staple and the spike for the rest of the trip.

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Updated on February 4, 2010

Updated on May 3, 2010:

Moved part of this post to the Sounds Kinky-er blog:
http://soundskinkyer.blogspot.com/2009/07/europe-2009-amsterdam-friday-july-24.html