Dec 29
Saturday.
Train from Brussels to Brugge
Yes. The trains do run on time.
Ticket office said the train was going to leave in two minutes.
We hurried to the platform for last call. As we were getting on I asked a British couple if this was the train to Brugge. He said, we hope so. And the doors closed and the train was moving.
The intercity train runs every half hour and it will take about an hour to get to what is described as one of the most beautiful and best preserved medieval cities in Europe. I’ll write about it tomorrow on our short train ride into Paris.
Like London and Amsterdam, I’ve been to Paris only once and then a very long time ago as a college history student in England.
On this trip I’ve arranged for our hotel and even dinner reservations
On my first trip to Paris as a clueless youth, it didn’t occur to me to plan on a place to stay. From London I took the ferry across a very choppy English Channel. Heaven helps the fool they say. Or maybe we make our own luck but I struck up a conversation on the ferry with a young French man who did not hide his surprise that I didn’t have a place to stay and did not speak any French.
He gave me the name of a place where he said the owner spoke some English.
Somehow without a map I made my way to this inn where to owner barely spoke English. I booked a room that was out of Last Tango in Paris, minus Marlin Brando. Its window opened onto a small balcony overlooking the Parisian street scene.
I did bring a French dictionary which provided the Parisians I spoke with much merriment.
This time I come with a few more French phrases and technology that will give me real time translation.
Windmills
Out the windows I see today’s windmills. For half a millennium the people of this area used wind to power their needs. Today there are elegant wind turbines. There is no small amount of irony And yes shame to be from the only developed country that is not part of a global climate change agreement. I’ve not seen one diesel train in Europe. So far I’ve only seen electric.
These are some of the most populated cities in Europe, but the air is clean.
Over beers in London with a young British businessman, we talked about our respective counties.
“My country can’t agree to Brexit and there are calls for the Prime Minister to step down and your government just closed. Hard to say whose more messed up. It’s pretty close.”
During that conversation we talked about the rise of the extreme right in Europe and the US. Several European countries are flirting with authoritarian nationalism. In a continent that still shows physical scars on the Nazis, there is an unease about what my drinking companions are seeing.
“Immigrants and multiculturalism are one of the things that’s makes England great and yet right wing power seekers are trying to use it as something to fear.”
I nodded. I thought of the immigrants that I know in Canby. I thought of my friend who manages a nursery explaining what he only has immigrants working for him.
“I can’t get a white guy to apply because they don’t want to work that hard digging in the dirt in the rain” says my friends who is a self described gun toting red neck.
As I travel far away from home, I think about home and the questions we face as a nation and as a community.
I see great cities with efficient infrastructure. Built to last generations.
And I think of my friend Tony’s post on Canby Now about a neat idea for a park. Quickly and predictably followed by, yeah but it would cost taxes.
Yes it would. But if we start every conversation that way, we will abandon any real chance of building great cities.
I heard a speech by a vet one time who talked about how she appreciated people acknowledging her willingness to die for her country.
But she said for those at home there is more to that in showing appreciation for soldiers.
She said it is up to those who do not serve to make sure we have a country, a city worth dying for.
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