Celebration in London

It was the perfect Canada Day weekend. We met up with friends to revel in the summer heat and drink beer. We went to an outdoor concert. We drank beer. All that was missing was the barbecued hot dogs and the fireworks.

And somehow, we did it all in London: the cosmopolitan, bursting-at-the-seams British version, not my gentle-but-enthusiastic Ontario hometown, which for those of you who weren't aware, does in fact have a Thames River to back up the name.

We had arranged weeks before that Stefan and Laura, who you will remember from Cologne, and Stef's girlfriend Hawley (another ginger!) would come to London to meet us for the Mumford and Sons and Arcade Fire concert in Hyde Park.

I won't give a full a concert review here, but I will tell you that if you have the chance to see either group live, do it! Mumford and Sons mustered the same intensity they have on the album, and their new stuff sounds like it could be excellent. And the Arcade Fire... amazing. Old albums and new albums. Amazing. They played Power Out, my favourite from Funeral, right when Dan and I pushed through to the middle of the dancing, writhing crowd. So good!

We had a late start the next day, but Dan and I spent the day wandering the north bank of the Thames and Westminster, trying to get an idea of this giant city. It is positively overwhelming. We had a great day just looking at the buildings and the people.

We met up with the rest of the gang to check out the Canada Day celebration in Trafalgar Square - early in the day there was street hockey, and they had Timmies (!) and Molson Canadian and a sham poutine (mozzerella? Sigh). By the time we got there, they were down to Red Stripe. It is in a red and white can, granted, but it is also Jamaican.

Close enough for us.

Our final day, Dan and I toured around the City, the oldest section of London that now serves as the financial and business district: as we were there on a Saturday, it was deserted save for some tourists. We took a look at the London Museum for some info on the city's long history, and explored the quiet streets with their old churches and pubs and squares.

We arrived slightly too late to explore the Tower of London, so we decided to save it for our second run-through before the flight to Istanbul. Instead, we crossed the Tower Bridge and strolled along the South Bank.

We didn't do much traditional sightseeing, but London treated us well - and sitting with friends on beer-drenched grass at an outdoor concert soothed the pain of missing Bluesfest and cottages and the beautiful Ottawa summer.

Miss you all, friends, and thank you to Stef and Laura and Hawley for a great Canada Day weekend!

S.

Amsterdam

Leaving Bremen, we spent a night in Groningen, the colourful, canal-filled student town at the centre of an otherwise rural and quiet province in the northeast of the Netherlands.

The Canadian Grand Prix was on that night, and to Dan's great delight our private room was equiped with a television. I took a little walk to explore the centre, ringed with canals. A few of the buildings are pretty, the museum is a mass of adventurous architecture and colour. And I found the red light district by accident - it's much more discrete than the one we'd see in a couple days. But after my wanderings, I too had an early night.

On Monday morning, we grabbed a train and within a few hours we'd crossed half of the tiny country and arrived in Amsterdam.

We has intentionally split our four nights between two hostels - Monday and Tuesday aboard a little barge in the harbour, Wednesday and Thursday we decided that to get a taste of the city's wilder side, we would stay at a hostel in the red light district.

The boat - the Avanti - had tight quarters, but was cute and well-kept. Our twin cabin had bunks that were half the width of the room, and ran the entirety of its length. Which makes the cabin sound roomy - let me assure you that at roughly one and a half metres wide and two metres long, it was not.

But we did fit in - Dan literally just barely fit into his bunk - and the staff (crew?) was very helpful and friendly. It was great to try something new after the dozens of hostels we'd been to over the past months, and at €56 was one of the cheaper (and I bet cleaner) private rooms in the city centre.

In the first two days, we explored the city centre and its extensive canal network by foot. We checked out the Van Gogh Museum - expensive, but it was nice to focus the day's learning on one artist and his immediate peers. I am sure I retained more this way than I usually do in my scattered veering around museums. It helps that I enjoy Van Gogh and his enthusiasm for colour. We also wandered through the Vondlepark and went to the Heinekin brewery. Which is pricey and at times a bit campy, but the tour shows you very comprehensively how beer is made, and includes three beers. Sold!

We didn't party as such while staying on the boat - past the Heinekin brewery we only had a couple of beers on a patio to celebrate the sunshine. We did buy a piece of 'space cake,' and then spent the evening crammed into the bottom bunk watching Arrested Development in an agoraphobic huddle. When we did get up to the kitchen to make our cup-a-soups, we found ourselves watching This Is Spinaltap.

Our second hostel was the infamous Bulldog, known primarily as a well-established chain of coffeeshops throughout the city. Remembering that in the Netherlands, coffeeshops serve soft drugs along with a caffeine hit. The hostel itself has been around for twenty-odd years, which often would mean worn-out facilities, but here means that they have the management of stoned-out backpackers down to a science. Our room was clean and blissfully removed from the racket of the bar, smoking wasn't allowed in the rooms.

We briefly explored the heart of the red light district once we got to the Bulldog. It's everything you assume it is: scantily clad ladies in windows who would like to get to know you better... biblically. They stand in pretty underthings under red lights, some smiling, some on their cell phones. The window is actually a door that opens into a small room containing a bed and little else (it also has a discrete panic button for the prostitute's safety. There are advantages to a legal sex trade). Closed curtains mean business.

Wednesday night was the Stanley Cup final. We had heard from another Canadian in the hostel that a bunch of people were planning to watch the game at a sports bar nor far away. We had a nap, and then around one in the morning, we set off. Fortified by kebabs (with questionable meat in Dan's, we discovered later) we found the bar. Turns out that no one in Holland really cares about hockey - the gaggle of Canadian and American tourists that had gathered were unceremoniously booted out at 3. Which is fine except that I had just bought a round of beer and we weren't warned... anyway, probably best that we went home. After stopping for frites and mayo. Obviously.

The next day we woke late, and spent most of the day wandering around the canals again. The architecture in Amsterdam is so pretty. The houses are thin, no more than three or four metres usually, but rise upwards at least three, often four or five stories. There are few alleys. In a city of canals, space is precious, and so the houses are shoved up against each other.

The peaked roofs are often hidden by a false front that contains a pulley for swinging furniture through the massive windows. So that nothing smashes into the walls, many of the street-facing walls lean forward at a conspicuous angle, as if craning over the bricked streets to see the swans floating down the canals.

Amsterdam is an interesting city. I think the novelty of the sex and the drugs would wear off quite quickly for anyone who stayed for long (with the exception of a few time-battered hippies we saw who have in all probability been in the same haze since the eighties). The Dutch are actually known to be a generally conservative bunch. Just because they have decided that a person should be allowed to smoke dope or hire a prostitute does not mean that they themselves wish to do so all the time, or even at all. It just means want the right to make the choice.

In fact, apparently a law is coming into effect soon banning the sale of legal soft drugs (meaning weed, hash and truffles/mushrooms) to non-residents. Amsterdam doesn't want to be known as the city of drugs anymore, and having witnessed the mayhem of stoned tourists in the city centre, I can't really blame them. The city has so much else to offer - why specialize in getting the rest of the world blazed?

That said, it's fun to smoke a joint without feeling like a criminal. The trick is to not get so wasted that you abuse the priviledge, or miss out on the delights of a beautiful city.

S.

Normandy: Exploring the Wars

The wall of the Norman fort in Caen

We continued our adventures with my parents, heading out of Paris on a Sunday morning.

Juno beach was peaceful when we made our pilgrimage on a late May afternoon. We'd stayed in Caen the night before and made the short drive to the coast. The sand was bright and inviting, shifting gently in the Atlantic breezes.

Although the image of absolute chaos, of bodies strewn over the beach while bullets and shells flew overhead is difficult to place in this now quiet and pretty stretch of beach, the reminders are everywhere. The sand is slowly covering the big, squat German bunkers that line the whole coast, but these imposing structures are easy to find and explore. Tanks and big guns now form memorials to the soldiers who struggled up the beach to liberate Normandy.

Sunken bunker near Juno Beach

We took a tour at the Juno Beach Centre led by a Canadian history student through the nearest bunker and down onto the beach, and spent an hour in the extensive museum.

We went down the coast and found the remains of the Mulligan harbour, which my Dad swam out to touch in the eighties, and wandered around a coastal battery. We found the small town where the 1st Hussars, his regiment since the 70s, was decimated a week after the landings in the push towards Caen, and we finished the day at a Canadian war cemetary - incredibly well kept and beautiful.

And that was the easy day, history-wise.

You want to know what kind of tank this is?
I have no idea. You can ask my dad though.
He's a tank savant. He drives them, he loves them,
he will tell you all about them -
whether or not you are pretending to listen.
Dad, you're the best.
Sorry I'm bad at listening about the tanks.
Update: he says it's a Churchill.

We had an easy night - kebab for dinner, my Mom's new favourite food, and after a game of euchre (so nice to play something other than rummy!) we went to bed early.

The next morning we took off north from Caen for a veritable scavenger hunt of war sites. First to Dieppe, just up the coast, to stand in the wind under the huge, steep cliffs, and to see the slippery stone beach where so many Canadian soldiers died in a botched raid in 1942.

We found the British WWI cemetery in Boulogne sur Mer on a mission to find the grave of Edward Hunter, Grandfather of family friend Carol, and then after stopping to admire the white cliffs across the English Channel, we drove on to Dunkirk to see the beach from which the British evacuated in 1940.

Tired, but determined  we drove south from Dunkirk to Vimy. As you approach the town, the Canadian war monument is visible on the ridge for kilometres, its freshly restored white marble easy to pick out among the forests surrounding it.

We barely made the last tour of the site, led again by a Canadian student. I'm glad we did - its the only way down into the tunnels. We toured through a tunnel (one of a massive complex) and saw a few rooms, and returned to the surface through the exit used on the day the battle began, where the soldiers stood nervous and primed for combat.

We wandered the reconstructed trenches until the site closed, and then spent some time at the monument, enjoying the fact that we were on Canadian soil, for Dan and I the first time in two months.

We drove from Vimy across the northern border and through the flat Belgian countryside right to Brussels - by the time we found the hotel and parked the car, it had been 14 hours since we'd left Caen.

The Butte de Lion: the only hill in Belgium, as far as I could
tell. It's man-made.

We spent the next day at the battlefield in Waterloo, climbed the Butte de Lion and visited the former headquarters of both Wellington and Napoleon, then had the best burgers I've had in months at a little restaurant in Waterloo. My parents left the next morning to return to Paris to end their trip.

So for those of you who know my Dad, I think it was pretty much a dream vacation for him. He was a reservist in the 1st Hussars for much of his life, and a peace keeper with the UN force in the Golan Heights. He is a military history re-enactor and a police officer. He is, at heart, very much a soldier, and so to visit these places is to pay homage to his brothers in arms.

For me, these sights would have been interesting in their own right. But with my Dad at the wheel as tour guide and interpreter, offering explanations and insights and taking us to these incredibly moving sites that we'd have otherwise missed - for me, this made the experience so much richer.

S.

Reconstructed trench at Vimy Ridge