TOURIST GOES HOME! HEARTS HEARD BREAKING ACROSS EUROPE!

From TORINTO,

May 23rd, 2008

It was both deafening and heartbreaking, the great wail that went up as my plane lifted off European soil. Alas, I was eager to get back to my mom's basement in Etobicoke and, ultimately, the little hamlet of Blyth, Ontario, favoured summer destination of all world travellers.

And the cheering as I landed made up for all the broken hearts so very far away.

What can I say? Paris. It's, you know, okay. If you're into that kind of thing.

First of all, everybody and everything was just so gorgeous. So obviously I felt right at home at once. I mean, don't get me wrong, Berlin was cool and hip and everything, but I don't find the people there particularly attractive. So Paris was a bit of a relief in that regard. I don't think I could ever live in a place where I wouldn't make out with at least, say, six percent of the eligible adult population. Okay, maybe that's a bit high. My point is that Paris is far more Makeoutable than Berlin, in my opinion. I'm just not down with the whole Aryan thing. Not my bag, as the kids are saying.

Skinny jeans finally made sense there. On us fatass North American bitches they don't work at all, but there seem to be a lot of slim hips and skinny thighs wiggling around Paris - must be all the pastry - and on them, the whole thing works a treat. I did see one chunky Parisian girl frumping along in skinny-bottomed jeans and I chased her down the cobblestones shouting "Non! Non! Pas pour vous!" Civic duty and all that. Nothing I wouldn't do at home.

They're all wearing these weird little ankle boots with a slit in the back of them. You tuck your skinny jeans inside them and they peek out throught the slit. It's odd. But works somehow. It's all in the confidence. And the wrist, for some reason. I only saw one gal in Harem pants, thank God. I think she was from some silly place like Spain.

I felt I fit right in. For one thing, the owner of the apartment I rented for the week (no hostel in Paris, no ma'am, not for me) left for my use, among other things, a big straw shopping bag, which served as my instant French disguise. No tourist would have that bag - c'est impossible! She must be one of us!

I always have prided myself on a general ability to blend in and not look like a tourist. Part of it is my one-eighth-everything ancestry, part of it my superfantastic acting ability. It didn't work so good in Germany, at least until I put my blond wig on (and then it was assumed I was an escapee from a local institution). But in France, as other places, I did all right. One help is that I have never set foot in a pair of Tevas/Birks/piles of puke with buckles(TM). Secondly, I ain't wearin' no damn fanny pack. And third, I walk with confidence, as if I know exactly where I'm going, even when I have less than half a clue and have forgotten to put on my glasses. Which is a lot of the time.

Seriously, I'll bet ninety-nine percent of people who get pick-pocketed in Paris are wearing fanny packs. It's like wearing a sign saying "Rob me! Rob me! Idiot tourist here!" Hell, even I wanted to rob those people. Teach them a lesson. And also score some extra cash for lingerie.

Of course, due to all this cockyness, I did pick up some hubris feet. I had cleverly bought a couple pairs of flat shoes (having not worn flats since 1982) before my trip, realizing that I'd need something comfortable for skipping merrily along the cobblestones eight hours a day. I got two pairs of little slip-on Champions. But early on in my European adventures - on the walking tour of Berlin, in fact - the white ones tried to destroy me.

I got a massive, and massively painful, blister on my left heel, and it was a bad, bad chain reaction from there. I'd show you a picture of my left foot as it is right now, but I honestly fear the feedback from people telling me it's the most hideous thing I've ever seen. These shoes are Champions? Champions of WHAT, I ask you! Champions of pain??! (Though the black ones are brilliant, if by now more than usually smelly.) But you'll never get me Tevas! NEVER!!!!!

Okay. I've calmed down. What you really want to know, I am fully aware, is where exactly my ugly little feet took me.

First things first: No, I did not go to the effing Louvre. I did not line up to see the Mona effing Lisa. Not interested. Everyone who'd been to Paris, in advance of my visit, told me the same thing, in a weary tone of voice: "Well you have to go to the Louvre, of course..." Why? Why do I have to go to the goddamn Louvre? Especially if you, who have been there, can't even seem to get worked up about it?

So I went to the Pompidou, the contemporary gallery, and hung out with my buddies Matisse and Man Ray and Picasso and all those cool motherfuckers. There was a temporary Louise Bourgeois exhibit, which was fantastic, and several things that made me nauseous, which is all I ask of modern art.

The other temporary exhibit was called Traces Du Sacre, and was an exploration of artists through the ages working out their relationships with God. I was all, like, who cares, get over it already, but it started to get to me after a while. There was a psychedelia section, which really made me ill - all right! - and then this piece called "Him" by Maurizio Cattelan, which left me shaken to the very core.

It really has to be experienced personally, but here's a description. You walk in to a room in the gallery, and in it, there is a little boy in short pants down on his knees facing a wall, his back to you. He seems to be praying. It takes a moment to realize the little boy is a sculpture. You walk over to the wall and look at the card that tells you that the piece is called "Him", which you take as meaning "God". Perhaps you, as I did, start to walk out of the room and on to the next thing, when you decide to move around for a closer look, see the boy's face. You approach, and realize that the boy is the adult Adolf Hitler. Completely lifelike, his eyes skyward, praying. I felt instantly terrified and frozen. I felt like running clear out of the museum yet couldn't look away. Maybe it was especially strange having just been in Germany, I don't know, but it was like being in the room with the man. I get freaked out just thinking about it.

Do look up Cattelan; his other work is pretty fascinating. Here's "La Nona Ora" (The Ninth Hour), his sculpture of Pope JP2 hit by a meteor:

Yup.

I had decided, before coming to France, to spend a day in Giverny, at Monet's house among other places, and this turned out to be one of my favourite days of the whole trip. I've never been totally gay for Impressionist art, but last year when my mom and I visited the NY MOMA and I saw the water lilies full scale for the first time, it suddenly made sense. Quite different from my previous Impressionist impressions, which had been from the usual Renoir dog food bowls and Degas keychains.

So anyway, they've got Monet's house open as a museum, preserved in its original colours, which are basically like the Best Little Whorehouse in Strawberry Shortcake Land. And - the exciting part, and the really big draw - they've maintained his enormous gardens exactly the way they were in Monet's life. So you can hang out on the green bridge with the lilacs and look out at the water lilies. And shit like that.

Understand that the day in question I was proud of myself for being up and about at all, as I had been awake until the wee hours with blue-eyed Danny, an other, even more extraordinary, gulp, twenty-one year-old from Chicago. Too weird. Later, back in Berlin, I would make fast friends with Tracy, an L.A. animator who turned out to be originally from.....you guessed it. If these three are any indication, I oughtta just go ahead and buy myself a one-way ticket. I'm thinking ol' Chi-town would score pretty high on the Tourist's Make-Out-O-Meter.

All that to say I was a little in the way of a hangover that was trying to walk through me, and rather underslept, when I awoke that morning, but what a beautiful frenchy day it was, and I was determined to get out into the country.

As planned I took the train to Vernon, about 45 minutes NW of Paris, and then rented a bike across from the station. There's a lovely bike path that runs between the two towns, which I enjoyed very much once I finally got on the damn thing. I'd stupidly taken the wrong turn I knew full well not to take, and then ended up cutting through someone's yard and up a hill and ripping my arm open on some rosebushes.

I didn't know I'd cut myself until I was in line, dripping blood all over Monet's sidewalk, and heard some British tourists behind me contemplating what I'd done to myself. They assumed I didn't speak English, you see, on account of my straw bag.

I was glad I went to Giverny for several reasons: It was amazing and liberating to get out on a bike and away from the city in the middle of my urban vacation. It was perhaps life changing to discover my future career as a photographer of flowers, fences, and blades of grass. (I would add monkeys later in Berlin.) And lastly, I think it's very important for everyone, at age thirty-two, to decide where they want to live when they retire/get rich and famous and married to George Clooney. The French countryside definitely tops the list right now.

What else? Champs D'Elysee? Check. Arc de Triomphe? Check. Eiffell tower, gathering place of the rudest, pushiest tourists from everywhere on Earth? Check, twice, day and night, though I never did go past the second level due to a bomb threat or mechanical problem or the top level being rented out by the Olsen twins. Umm.....Broken Social Scene show at the Elysee Montmartre? Check check checkity check. (Great show, the french are NUTS for BSS, and when they were filled in that the chick onstage that night was Amy Millan of Stars, they all started saying "Ooooh, Stars, Stars," in hushed awed voices and taking lots of pictures.) Caught in an insane thunderstorm on the streets of the left bank? Check. Turkish bath house full of mostly-naked French girls? Check.

Now that was one ill-planned Saturday. I had decided I didn't want to visit Versailles on a Saturday, thinking it would be lousy with tourists on the weekend and wanting a relaxing final day.

I'd read about this beautiful old Hammam called La Grande Mosquee and figured that even if it were busy on the weekend, surely a quiet spa atmosphere of tranquility would reign. I didn't know it was the one place where all the loudest girls in Paris congregate on their day off. It's beautiful all right, but full of hundreds of women all shouting at the top of their lungs, in very echoey rooms. The massage and gommage (a big ol' mama scrubs you all over with gritty stuff and a mitt until your ass near falls off) take place on tables all over the place with people constantly shouting and shoving their way past and checking out each other's tits. Now and then the front desk decides to blast half a Turkish song at full volume for some women near the door who feel like dancing, and then it stops abruptly again.

By the time I realized you had to take a number for your massage, I was number 178, and plonked down and half-napped in the courtyard for close to three hours while trying to listen out for the shout of "Mille Soissant-Dix-Huit!" I tell you, it takes some kind of Jedi power to relax in that place. I managed to do it somehow, which maybe just shows how worn out I was by this point.

I also saw my first real-life naked pregnant lady, who asked to go ahead of me for her gommage. (I said "Back off, fatty", but she didn't understand English.) She was stunning, as are all the pregnant women in Paris. I would see them walking down the street with their beautiful dresses and their chic haircuts and their glowing skin and want to cheer them on. "Yes! Go, you beautiful French ladies! Populate the earth with more like you!" Later I realized how rare it was that I saw any actual infants in Paris. Where were they hiding, I started to wonder. Then, on my last night, as I left La Canaille, the exquisite restaurant where I had my last French supper, a man was heading in with a wailing baby in a basket. And it hit me: I was witnessing a delivery. Yes, my friends, the French eat their young. But who can complain, when they're prepared so well? Nothing like a Little Boeuf Babeignon. (Hardy har.)

By the way, I didn't find Parisians to be particularly rude. Then again, I'm from Toronto, so I figure if you punch me in the face you're just saying hi. No, I look at it this way: Paris has been a tourist destination for hundreds of years. People come, people go, most don't bother to learn the language. So they're just not gonna bother all too much with you. I mean, even in Niagara-On-The-Bloody-Lake, we developed a rather dismissive view of daytrippers; now imagine you're a waiter in Montmarte. So, no, you don't get much Where y'all from?, but I can deal with that. Besides, even the people who are stuck up have got pretty good reason: they live in fucking Paris! Look around for chrissake!

I was getting by speaking mostly french, so that helped right off the bat. My problem is, and I have the same problem in spanish, and now in german to some extent, I sound pretty good. I'll decide what I want to say and it'll come out quick and confident, and then the native speaker will come back at me full speed ahead, and all I can do is giggle and shrug and look like an ass because I have no idea what he just said. So I learned to start off with a little "pardon my French" right off so they wouldn't think I was a local. Or Swiss. Apparently I speak french with a Swiss accent, which is I guess what happens when you learn it in Ontario.

The only time someone was patently rude to me, it was a huffy, impatient transit employee, but any TTC driver could give him a run for his money any day of the week. I am in love with the Paris Metro system, by the way. It's efficient, and easy to use, and the windows open on the trains, so you can feel the breeze rushing at you as you zip through the tunnels..... The automated lady who calls out the stops sounds kind of hot, and the signs on the platform telling you when the next train is coming are aways right. (This was true in Berlin too, though I found their system more confusing as all the trains run on the same tracks and everything is in stupid german for some reason.) Toronto, man. It's one thing that they don't let you know when the train's supposed to come; I thought they went a bit far when they put up signs saying "It'll get here when it gets here. Go fuck yourself."

I was a little sad to leave my honeymoon for one in Paris after just one week. Especially to have to leave my little loft in the Marais to go back to the (totally great, mind you) hostel.

But I did get some great souvenirs, some world-class photos, and yes, some slinky lingerie - along with the exciting knowledge that, in Europe, I am bra size 85B, which makes me feel like I have a ENORMOUS rack. Even if it is the smallest size they carry.

The train ride back to Berlin was beautiful and scenic and featured many a field of windmills. I observed that Germany's main crop is grass: lush, green, ordinary grass. Which they dry and stuff into little baggies for export to Amsterdam, where it is sold to morons from Toronto. I also learned the importance of knowing the difference between "Is this seat taken?" and "Is this seat available?" in the local language. I was confusing Germans left, right and centre, as I tried to save the seat for the stupid woman next to me who kept disappearing every time new people got on the train and leaving me to deal with them.

One unavoidable and perversely fun game is to imagine all the stern train employees - and later everyone, everywhere - in Nazi uniforms, and decide their rank. Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like fun; in fact now that I've written it down it sounds really, really fucked up.....but you go to Germany and try not to do it. I mean, they're actually strolling up and down the aisles shouting for your Reisepass! "Herr Jones?!"

On my return to Berlin, I checked back into East Seven, where this week's roomies included a sweet child-like Brasilian, several Canadians who seemed to have come to Europe in order to take a nap, and a dude from Dubai who was a dead ringer for Gene Simmons, never took off his cowboy hat, and insisted that I was from some place called "Torinto".

"Nope, I'm from Toronto."
"Toronto? No, no, I only know Tor-in-to."
"Okayyyy...but are you thinking of Canada?"
"Yes - what is the capital?"
"Well, that's Ottawa.....but you're probably thinking of Toronto."
"Torinto."

In the end I conceded. Quite frankly, he was so confident that I started to wonder and became really embarrassed about the fact that I've been pronouncing my hometown's name wrong all these years and everyone's been too nice to tell me so.

So I was all daytimey and good this time around. The next few days if I met anyone from Chicago or London I ran across the road and insisted they keep a fifty metre distance. So I done did the Deutsche History Museum (for six spellbound hours or so), went up the Berlin TV tower (meh), checked out the Reichstag's beautiful new dome (fantastic), and on my last, glorious day, rented a bike and rode through Tiergarten Park and to the Berlin zoo, which is amazing.

Aforementioned monkey photography to follow on another day.

I had wrongly been prepared for a lot of ack ack ack, but the German language really is quite soft and full of shhh sounds. It's like visiting a country full of well-heeled librarians. Or maybe they were actually telling me to shut the fuck up. Ang go home already. Which sadly, I did.

My neighbours on the plane were a gang of drunken redfaced Germans wearing headphones and shouting at the flight attendants over the sound of 27 Dresses. They yelled "Viskey!" on repeat until there was none left on the plane and then demanded that we touch down immediately. I'm pretty sure the big one next to me stole my peanuts as I slept.

Stay tuned, my sexy friends, and even hotter family, for the trip photo issue, for the return to Blyth, and for The Tourist's Practical Guide to Airport Etiquette (or how to tell customs to

suck it and not end up in prison).

Until then,
Send a file or dynamite,

The Tourist

first i take my pants off.....then i take berlin.

From BERLIN, GERMANY
May 10th, 2008

Dudes, oh dudes. (Am I allowed to say "dudes" when in Europe? Will the cool police come and get me and throw me in the loser tank for the night?) Dudes, my darling ones, mein dammen und herren, here I am safe and sound across the pond, madly typing away on a silly Euro keyboard from Berlin before catching my overnight train to Big Fat Gay Paree. Just wanted to say a few words from Germany.....
APFEL!
VERGNÜGEN!
ACHTUNG!
PFANNKUCHEN!
That's all. Goodbye.
(Most blessedly short update the Tourist has ever written! All this German efficiency must be rubbing off on me.) On second thought.........

Okay, first of all, Berlin is pretty awesome. I hadn't pictured it quite so green, and even though I'd read somewhere that the city is something like 40% green space, I had to be here to really comprehend what that means. (Hey, no one ever said I was the brightest bulb on die tannenbaum.) It means trees EVERYWHERE, stupid. Parks everywhere. And then - get this, concrete-dwelling Torontonians - trees.....that aren't even in parks. Now that's just weird. I mean, get off it already, fancy Europeans. Seriously.

The weather here is insanely good right now, so it's a prime time to enjoy all this nature and crap. I arrived what should have been completely exhausted but the sunshine managed to wake me up, miraculously. I'm about eighty days behind on sleep right now. And I only got here on Thursday.

After a fairly sleepless Tuesday night in Toronto, I took the bus to the airport from Kipling Station, which I'd never done before. There we all are, a gang of strangers on the bus platform waiting for the Airport Express, and I'm thinking, Hey, Isn't this neat!

Surely this was no ordinary TTC bus. It would be full of world travellers, both excited and sophisticated. We'd talk about our travels, share stories and advice, wish one another luck. I thought we'd, I don't know, hold hands and stare into one anothers' eyes and join in singing It's a Small World After All. I'd get lots of autographs in my yearbook, and comemmorate the experience with a new tattoo. I thought it would be beautiful.

Instead, everyone just shoved their fat asses and their suitcases on and glared at one another, like on any other bus ride. I was the only idiot who couldn't stop grinning, undaunted even by the puffy, scary man across the aisle whose face looked like it had the habit of being punched at least twice a day and who continually glared at me as though he wanted me dead.

I became (still cheerily) convinced that he was a regular user of this route for the sole purpose of robbing tourists at the airport, and promptly reported him to security as a terrorist when we arrived. Last I saw, they were punching him in the face.

I boarded the plane with my usual assortment of undeclared liquids, gels, illicit drugs and a miniature chainsaw, and some declared shampoos and things in their little see-through case, each of which airport security insisted on swabbing with some mysterious goop. Because the bottles have no labels, security woman says. What does the goop do, say I, merely curious. We have to put it on if there are no labels, she says. Yeah but, I say again, what does it DO? Then she tells me if I don't want goop next time I should buy mini travel shampoos and things instead of using my refillable blank ones. As if I couldn't have filled a Head and Shoulders bottle with something else. I explain that I don't like wasting the plastic. She looks at me like I'm a retard. I punch her in the face and run away. Problem solved!

Another thing that joined me on the plane was my arsenal of sleep thingies. I had my soft fuzzy eye mask (like a teddy bear is sitting on your face), my earplugs, my pillow, my syringe of heroin........all the things a seasoned traveller brings to conk out en route. Unfortunately, I'm also a quite accomplished insomniac, damn me, and didn't get one wink. When I did drift just to the edge of sleep, the army of screaming babies attacked. This one kid five rows behind me spent most of the trip screeching as if his mother had ripped his arms off. I was ready to suggest she do it, as having arms was obviously doing nothing for him.

And there's the broad next to me, no earplugs, no eye mask, nothing......out absolutely cold. Lucky German bitch.

I've decided that all planes should have a soundproof room on them for babies and for frat boys who want to spend flights comparing, A) How drunk they got where they were, and B) How drunk they plan on getting where they're going. And another soundproof room for me and me alone. Oh why didn't God make me deaf? Instead, he made me funky.

So I arrive in green Berlin at nine (Berlin time) the next morning, take a cab in and drop my stuff off at the hostel (which I can't check into until THREE), and spend the day wandering along the River Spree, sitting in a beach chair at a waterside bar, and napping briefly in a park full of Berliners tanning in their underwear. By the end of day one I'd developed a tan and some truly silly tan lines..... It was great. It's been upwards of 25 Celsius here every day, and the outdoor life in Berlin is glorious. Every bar has a patio, the Spree is covered in them, the parks are gorgeous (Volkspark Friedrichshain would be the biggest and best park in any other city; here it's number two or three. When I come back here after Paris I'll hit Tiergarten, the big one, which is enormous.)

So yes, The Tourist is staying in a HOSTEL. I know, I know, I'm too old for this shit. I just really wanted the experience of bedbugs and diseases caught from toilet seats. Joking. This place, East Seven Berlin, is cute and clean and looks like an IKEA catologue come to life. I did have my own private room the first night, and then switched to a dorm with five other people (mostly Germans who won't speak to me) as the singles were booked.

I was unsure how I felt about sharing a room. Everything I'd read told me this place was not a big party hostel, but still, I anticipated staid old me being woken by loud nighttime partiers stumbling home. Instead...well....reverse that. Yep. I'm the asshole.

Day two I decided to take a walking tour of the city that leaves from the hostel, expecting something kind of serious yet informative. I didn't know it would end up leading me to partyland. (Indirectly, of course).

The tour was led by Sylvia, a hot chick from Montreal who's been running tours all over the place the last ten years - she arrived in Berlin three years ago and was giving tours of it a week later. Our tiny group set out and picked up people at another hostel and in a park until it was a group of about twenty, some Yanks, some Brits, a very gorgeous Frenchman, a couple from Senegal and a gaggle of blondes from Calgary, who managed to typify everybody's idea of the obnoxious American tourist. Ah, Alberta, doing us proud as usual. They were a few of the many people I encountered who were "doing Europe" in a few weeks, which of course means two days in each place, hence hostels and pubcrawls with fellow tourists, and very little else.

Anyway, Sylvia was not only cute but very insightful and an excellent tour guide, and had a definite twisted Canadian sense of humour, which made for a few odd jokes that were lost on everyone but me and may have seriously confused the Calgarians. At one point she actually referred to Goering as "everybody's favourite Nazi"; all she said about the Huguenot museum was that she had never actually seen anyone go into it.

We saw a great many of the sights-to-see, including the Holocaust Memorial, which is quite amazing, the Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie, a piece of the Wall, and a parking lot outside an apartment complex. This particular lot is situated on top of the former site of Hitler's bunkers where he and Ava Braun and the gang spent their final days. No sign , nothing. Just a parking lot. I think the idea was that to acknowledge it would be to glorify him in some way.

Berliners have put so much thought into these things; I read that there are over 200 memorials all over the city, some big, some small, some hardly noticeable unless you know where to look. In the square where the Nazi book burning took place, there is a tiny window in the ground: you look into it and see an underground library full of empty bookshelves. Across the way, Humboldt University, whose students helped Goebbels gather the books to be destroyed, holds a used book sale out front 365 days a year by way of an apology. It's taken the almost twenty years since reunification to decide what to do about the former East German parliament; after much heated debate, they are only now tearing it down, brick by brick. The Neue Wache Memorial is quite moving and very controversial. It's stark chamber containing only a statue of a grieving mother holding the body of her son. It's also the resting place of - here's the controversial part - both an unknown German soldier and a Holocaust victim, and is dedicated to all the victims of war.

It's no wonder Berliners aren't the smiliest lot. They're being reminded every single place they go and every day that they were complicit in something unspeakably terrible. I think it's wonderful how thoroughly their stance has been to not let themselves off the hook.

A very strange note: a company recently given a contract for a preservatory substance for the Holocaust memorial turned out to be the same company that manufactured Zyclon B, the death chamber gas. When this was discovered there was a huge uproar, and the company defended themselves by saying that first of all it wasn't the current proprietors' doing, and besides, what they had done was no worse than any factory that made anything during the war and contributed to the German economy at the time, thus fuelling the war effort and the holocaust. Basically equating making Zyclon B with manufacturing toothpaste. They eventually agreed to donate their product and the work for free.

You may be wondering how all this led to dancing until six a.m., but it turns out that a walking tour is the perfect place to meet crazy British people who want to take you out on the town, among others. At the end of the tour a gang of us, including Sylvia, ended up drinking on the Spree (Caiparinhas, which I've since discovered should be called Crapperinyas for what they do to you - I met a bartender last night who thought he was doing me a big favour by giving me a really large, really strong one at the end of the night and I've been cursing his name all day).

Anyway, I joined Sylvia and the Brits, and Jean-Philippe, aforemontioned Frenchman, who really is the kind of goodlooking that can make women take their clothes off by just looking at them too long, for dinner and drinks and then dancing all night at this beautiful, hopping club on the river called Watergate. I managed to party like it was 1989 (tee hee, Berlin joke, wall coming down, get it?), dancing with the city's best party animals to an amazing DJ.....and escape with my clothes still on, breaking Jean-Philippe's mystical gaze with my SuperCold Canadian power. Yeah! Wait......am I bragging about not sleeping with gorgeous French people? Dammit! I've fucked up this trip already!

Next night was the Jamie Lidell concert (Lidell is an awesome funky singer I learned of through the ex-squeeze - he's British but now lives in Berlin), at a beautiful old venue called Admiralspalast, with Johnny Greeneyes from Chicago, another dude I met on the tour. Jamie Lidell was fantastic and absolutely wildly insane on stage, and we had a great time, despite the minor shock of Greeneyes and I sharing our ages and discovering that what was maybe supposed to be a date was transpiring between a twenty-one year-old and a thirty-two year-old. I was shocked at his youth, considering his maturity; he was blown away that he'd just met the youngest looking, coolest and most unfathomably beautiful thirty-something IN THE WORLD. What luck.

And I snuck into my hostel at six in the morning again, knocked everything over and woke everyone up. The Germans tried to gore me with their bayonets.

I've been getting by with really crap language skills: my Deutsche when I arrived consisted of "Good morning/afternoon/evening. I'm sorry, I don't speak German. I would like a glass of wine." I've since added different variations on the wine thing, and about five different ways of saying "I want". That's right, travelling the world speaking like a five year old again. GIVE ME THIS! GIVE ME THAT! I WANT BOOZE! (Okay, so I had an unorthodox childhood, what can I say?)

I had trouble at first remembering which version of "the" corresponded with which version of "a/some", ie which was masculine and which was feminine. Until I figured out the trick that "eine", which is feminine, rhymes with "vagina". So yeah. "eine vagina" - that's the extent of The Skeptical Tourist's Practical Tips on Learning German. I also think that Eine Vagina is the perfect name for the heroine of Disney's upcoming sex ed animated feature. I will provide the voices of both her and her (also German) trusty post-op tranny sidekick, "Nicht Dick".

There are ticket machines on all the streets that say "Hier Parkschein Losen" on them. Which I know is just telling you to buy your parking ticket, but I like to think it means "Park here, loser."

And the word for "tour" is "fahrt", which obviously makes me giggle. There are all kinds of fahrts here, too. Big ones; small, intimate ones; long ones; short ones; loud and rowdy ones. Again with the five year-old business! I know, I know. But can I just tell you that I saw a sign in a park the other day that said "Bitte Nicht Futtern"? Do Not Feed the Animals? Or Please Don't Fart? You choose.

I'm off now. Every now and then I have to jump up from the keyboard, grab one of my many passports and break into a panicked run through the streets of Berlin, in honour of my hero, Jason Bourne. (Love you, Matty D. Wish you were here.)

And now, a confession. I've written a great chunk of this email not from Berlin, but from Paris. This is the first time I've had the time and the energy (no thanks to last night's caipirinhas, the big Parisian ones) to finish saying all I want to say about Berlin. And don't get me started on Paris. All I'll say for now is that I'm trying desperately hard to stay Skeptical. The only thing that sucks here is my choice to be inside, in an internet cafe, on a stunning and warm Paris springtime day. But goddammit, I had to stay somewhere that's close to a toilet.

A bientot, my faraway darlings,

Everybody's Favourite Sweet and Sour,


The Tourist

P.S. Post your comments, send your emails. It's always nice to know you're all not dead.