nein.

More reporting from our Department of Cultural Stereotypes. It's because heyyyyyy, you can't help it, you just notice things, right? When you travel? Meet new "peoples"?

Like for example, you come visit America for the first time....you notice things! Wow, everyone's so polite and friendly all the time, unless they disagree with your politics, or unless you have any kind of opinion about America not being perfect, or unless they're sitting alone at their computer posting violent, misspelled vitriol about things they only barely understand at some vague, inarticulate, primal level of repulsion or attraction! There are TVs everywhere, really loud, all tuned to either CNN or ESPN or something with Guy Fieri in it! And the food, goodness, the food portions are so.....big! The people are so....so....big!

You know what I mean. So, I made some generalizations about France. And Italy. And Spain. And now, it's Germany's turn! Well, not really, I only have one and here it is: they sure do like to follow rules!

There was a sign at the entrance to the campground that I saw, but didn't really read, because I don't speak German and sometimes the signs, they just bounce off. This one said something like "Rest Period: 13:00-15:00 and 22:00-07:00".

Great, yes, I'm all for rest. People need rest. We certainly could've used some rest the night in question because we barely slept a fucking wink due to some asshole snoring away like a power saw somewhere nearby.

But I digress. Something that was not explained to us when we checked in was that this signage I almost noticed indicated a mandatory rest period during which no vehicles were supposed to be driven in the campground. So when we got home from Das Sonntag at 11:17pm or something Thursday night, the big metal gate to the campground was closed. "Huh", we said. "Boo."

I got out and looked at the gate, and lo and behold there was a place for a key, I tried the one key I'd been given for the bathroom and showers, and lo and behold it worked. Yay! Why would it work if you weren't supposed to use it? I quietly moved the gate aside, we drove in, I locked it, we parked, we walked to the tent, didn't sleep due to power snoring, etc.

The next morning when Nelson was brushing her teeth one of the campground managers came up to her and gave her a stern lecture about making noise in the campground after 10pm. "Two people complained!!!" How did anyone have any idea that Nelson was the culprit? This we don't know. Nelson replied to the manager (probably with a mouthful of toothpaste), "Yeah, we didn't know, very sorry!" The manager said, well, don't do it again, and Nelson said, yeah, um, sorry (fuck you), we're going to do it again tonight. We have a dinner reservation at 8pm, so I imagine we won't make it back by 10. "Well then you can't park inside the campground." Stare in disbelief. Snarl. Etc.

I missed all this, I was taking a shower or something. When I saw Nelson again there was literally steam rising off of her and she was flushed scarlet a delicate pink with apoplectic rage. Her last coherent word was,"Germans!!!!" before her eyes rolled back and she slipped into a mumbling semi-catatonia (ed. note: catatonia and mumbling? may want to check on this). Eventually I was able to get her eyes to refocus and she gradually turned unpink and she told me what happened and then it was time to go into town for breakfast and Art.

We ended up at Moma Kafehaus and had a helpfully-portioned cup of coffee and a surprisingly tasty and intereresting piece of healthy "Worpswede" chocolate cake, unfortunately I can't find any more info on this, then went to look for Heinrich Vogeler's house and the museum inside. How hard could it be to find?

Wellllll....we didn't have the Wifi or the Google Maps or the any useful technology, and the town had kept signage to an impressively absolute minimum, hopefully due to aesthetic concerns because that's the only valid reason there could be for making your main tourist attractions so goddamn hard to find, and so we eventually gave up and went to the Tourist Center to find a map.

Nelson parked outside with the engine running while I went inside for maybe 4 minutes, and I returned to find Nelson wild-eyed and pink again.

"Did you see that woman?" she said.
"What woman," I said, looking around.
"That woman on the bike."
"Uhh, no..."
"She just came up to me and told me I couldn't park here."
"But you're not parked here. You're waiting."
"Exactly! That's what I said. I said I'm waiting for my boyfriend, he's just in there."
"And?"
"And she said, well you can't wait here,"
"But there's nothing happening here."
"I know! And now...there she is! See her? She's taking a picture of that parked car over there."

Indeed, a totally normal-looking older woman (older than me, maybe 55) was on her bike, stopped, taking a picture of the back of a parked car with her phone. Was she the po-po? No visible indications of that. Was she just crazy? Could be.

Orrrrrrrr......was it just the kind of broken-camel-back behavior you see from rule-following locals in a town besieged by rule-breaking tourists.

shday3: dol-de-bretagne to plogoff.

Another long day of driving, almost 7 hours? But not unfun; just lots of slowwww parts due to "recreational vehicles", cyclists, and other assorted obstacles on small twisty roads.

Above: breakfast in the hotel bar in Dol-de Bretagne. Below: the hotel bar itself, which doubles as a horse racing betting parlor, we were just about the only people not boozing it up and/or otherwise ruining our lives at 10am on a Thursday; the stinky stinky Normandic (?) cheese that befouled the car overnight; Pointe Pen-Hir, beautiful and intimidating if a bit overrun with French tourists, when compared and contrasted with the Lost Coast last year where we were totally alone; not an egg on toast but rather the befouling stinky cheese redeeming itself via crusty bread and a yellow cherry tomato, this was our emergency late lunch, picture taken while driving, sorry; view from the hotel room in quaint and quiet Plogoff; my six oysters at the hotel restaurant; my pretty delicious duck gizzard "salad" with bacon and egg at same.

My overall impression of France thus far is: I miss Spain. Or I am looking forward to Spain. Eating in France is very little fun and kind of untransparently expensive compared to tapas culture. I mean I easily eat at less than half these prices in Spain and I can't say the the quality of the raw materials seems to be any better here. But then again beers here are €8 too. And the whole thing is just so serious and heavy.

Oh and I'm sure the attacks could be more cattily personal: The French seem less likely to laugh and more likely to be in bed by 11pm instead of just starting dinner. But hey, hey ok man chill the fuck out it's only day 3. But then again there's only Day 4 left for us to keep giving France a chance.

spanje recap.

Welllllllllll....where to start? Unromantic as it is, I'll start here: I just got an email from trusty cohort Papa J-Kim which said, among other things, something to the effect of it looking like I "spent a fortune on lush snackies" in Spain. Aside from the fact that "I" was not doing most of the spending, this is one of the amazing things about Spain: if you're eating tapas, you really have to exert yourself if you want to spend a fortune on food. OR (as we'll see), you have to make a bad Plan B after your Plan A is closed that day under mysterious circumstances, a scenario which seems to be the most likely reason by far that you would either eat badly or expensively or both.

Some examples: I think our favorite meal of the week was a lunch at Bodeguita Romero in Sevilla. In addition to wonderfully polite and efficient service, we had: a plate of homemade potato salad with vinegar and scallions; two bocadillos (just a little sandwich, ideally on toasted, crunchy bread) one with a good stinky roquefort and one with their celebrated pringa (blood sausage and pulled pork), €1.50 each; a plate of cumin-y stewed chickpeas and spinach; albondigas de choco (ehhh, cuttlefish meatballs, the Spanish sounds quite a bit better, no?). And four glasses of really good tinto de verano (red wine and lemon soda over ice). Total bill: €23.70. In Amsterdam you'd pay that much for the four drinks.

The "nicest" meal we had was probably at La Brunilda in Sevilla (an excellent Plan B, after La Azotea was mysteriously closed and our feet were totally destroyed so we were desperate for something close by), receipt pictured above, meal pictured below. A slightly-too-giant piece of burrata with a very smart and delicious salad of homemade pesto, oven-dried tomatoes, fresh tomatoes and arugula cost €5.50. I'm sure that in most cities you would be hard-pressed to find a giant piece of burrata for that price in the grocery store, much less at a "nice" restaurant. A lovely bowl of Idiazabal and wild mushroom risotto for €4.70. I had a delicious fucking (difficult to attractively photograph) langostino burger for €3.70, you can barely find a falafel for that price in Amsterdam. I'm just saying: it no make no sense.

And in the Department of Cultural Stereotypes: I have fewer complaints about the Spanish than I do about almost anywhere else I've ever been. Fun, polite, passionate nightowls who enjoy a good nap and don't live to work.

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tour diary: italy, day 1.

Above: Amsterdam the day before leaving, not a black and white photo.

First of all let it be acknowledged by me that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's definition of the word "tour" reads something like "a journey made by performers or a sports team, in which they perform or play in several different places."

This was initially really supposed to be one of those things, starting out in Milano (Lombardia) and gradually winding our way south to Lecce (Puglia) over the course of two weeks or so with a gig every other day or so. A little more than a month ago, Jeroen ended up getting a new job offer with a professional ensemble that, how you say, he could not refuse, so we ended up looking for a convenient place to snip/crop/trim the tour down a little shorter, and due to either intractable physical logistics or our coarsely-tuned cutting skills, we ended up turning a "tour" into more of a "visit": two gigs, four days.

Which ended up working out totally fine: SG has previously never been a predictably robust live performance outfit, and this was going to be our first real international experiment playing together: why push our luck, is what we maybe should have been asking ourselves. Or, maybe we should've been acknowledging that this whole "touring" thing is maybe the best way to become a predictably robust live performance outfit if you're ever going to be one at all etc. Hard to say.

In either case, veni vidi vici and all that shit: we went, we played, we had fun. Here's what happened.

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Jeroen and I have both spent a lot of time in Italy: I lived there for half a year 15 years ago, and have traveled around the country quite a bit, and Jeroen essentially lived there on and off for several years. So, very little about Italian culture surprises us at this point, except maybe to the degree that some of it either succumbs or remains so resistant to the homogenization that seems to be an inescapable side effect of technology and "the global village".

I mean, some things have totally been diluted in a negative, Body Snatchers kind of direction, beginning at the most superficial level: Italians no longer look as externally "Italian" as they did 15 years ago, now they're wearing the same idiotic Sissy-Boy shit that you can't avoid seeing everywhere here in Amsterdam, and I imagine most of Europe. You used to be able to recognize Italians at an international airport, it's much tougher now.

Also it's tragically much much easier to find crappy mass-produced tasteless corporate food in, say, train stations than it used to be (one of the most unexpected, kick-ass informal meals I had while traveling around Tuscany back in 2001 was an octopus salad at the Pisa train station, no really); and yes, now instead of reading newspapers or Vogue and ignoring strangers while on the train, Italians have their faces buried in their smartphones thumbing away at who the fuck knows what like everyone else on Earth. Ultimately I guess this is not so so weird, since 15 years ago a train full of Italians would've also been gesturing and/or yelling into their non-smart cellphones constantly while reading the paper or Vogue (they were kind of ahead of the curve mobile-phone-wise) but the silence of the smartphoned Italian train is a bit unnerving.

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But it was a welcome surprise that so many of the most distinctive and endearing clichés persist, or maybe they're even more endearing because they persist. For example, Italians still refuse to stand in a straight, single-file line when waiting for something. This is from Milano Centrale during our Day 3 travel in the middle of a national railway strike, the sign says "reserve your turn", basically "take a number", but what you can't really see is that the "line" is about four people wide, and every thirty seconds or so someone cuts in from the side, ignoring the fact that 40 people are "already standing there". It can be pretty exasperating until you try experimenting with it yourself, as we did on our EasyJet flight home when attempting to guarantee that we could carry on our guitars as hand luggage. And I must say, a) it works, and b) as long as you're cutting in front of Italians and not, say, English or American people, it feels pretty primally satisfying.

What other massive cultural generalizations can I make. Right: Italians still spend 95% of their energy behind the wheel of a car paying attention to something other than driving and will park anywhere that their vehicle will fit, and sometimes even where it won't. This is our lovely host Barbara's first and totally serious parking job when we went to dinner the first night in Milan (she's the red car on the sidewalk). The car is turned off, she's done parking. We talked her into maybe trying again since, you know, no one else was parked on the sidewalk and a parking ticket or towing event would've ruined her mood.

One more charming one, unless you're late and are trying to get somewhere via public transportation: they've really adopted a lot of new technology (touch screens, automated ticket machines, in-train monitors that show you what stations are coming up, etc) without, mmm, reaaalllly making it very helpful. The train from Milan's Malpensa airport to Milan Central Station was 50 minutes or something, and for the entirety of the trip, the in-train monitor unchangingly displayed the following, a line and two points representing our departure and arrival stations, no progress indicator, no detectable change at all.

More true and charming stereotypes: Italians still talk with their hands in a way that I'd imagine would require a completely different set of emoticons than the one I use, may it please never be created if it hasn't already. The men hug a lot. Everyone thinks about food a lot, but in a healthy-seeming, social way. And they still maintain a more relaxed sense of "schedule" than the cultures I live among. All of which, in the brief, concentrated, non-lethal dose we were given, was just about perfect.

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