I have been living in France for the last six months learning to speak rana (check your latin). I have many things to write about like 19 year old red-heads with a penchant for erotic poetry and a submission fetish but wait…
Where I live
I am not ready to write about France. Like swimming in the ocean I am too busy staying afloat to describe it. With a little time and perspective I will recount a most intense and pleasant period. In the interim lets wander through the summer junkets.
I started out the summer concert season with a trip to Poland. I spent a few days catching up with friends in Wroclaw before hopping in a car for an eleven hour drive to the North Sea. There is a three day music festival there called opener. I went with with my friends Piotr and Monika.
Monika and Piotr
I camped with the yahoos below for three days of dancing, drinking and late night insanity. They are a nice group of Engineers from Poland and Persia who carpooled in from Germany.
My Neighbors in Opener
Each day the festival opened late in the afternoon. In the day we took short trips around Gdansk and Sopot, two beautiful Polish cities. These are the famous gates where Solidarity was started by Polish dock workers. It was the event that lead to the end of Russian occupation of Eastern Europe and the demise of the iron curtain.
Piotr at the birthplace of solidarity in Gdansk
We took a day and went to Hel. Hel is a peninsula jutting from mainland Poland into the North Sea toward Sweden. This was the site of of the first battle to kick off World War II, where Poland’s often rude German neighbors initiated their demi-centennial attempt to take over the world.
On the way to Wroclaw from Marseilles I stopped off for a few days in Dublin to catch up with the Irish prophet. We went out to visit a few of the local pubs and I found myself in the early light of dawn deep in the suburbs with some Irish bird. Hmmm… I thought sharing a taxi meant sharing a taxi.
On a lark we decided to borrow his company van and go to the Aran Islands via Galway. The Aryan’s are three ancient islands in the Gael talk region. You take a short bumpy (nearly everyone aboard yacks) ferry ride off the west coast to the main island; Innish Man. After a short recovery we rented a couple of bicycles and went touring. One should note when I left Marseilles it was 24 C and when I reached Ireland it was 7 and raining cats and dogs.
When the Romans marched across Europe conquest they arrived at the coast and sent two scouts to Ireland. They scouts reported there was nothing worth having and thus Ireland was spared Roman conquest. This left most of their archeological record in place. Ironic, they later invited the Catholics to voluntarily finish what early Rome was to clever enough to avoid. I blame the new-found worship of a Jewish zombie….but I digress.
Innish Main is a good example of archeological record of which. It is a fortresses, thousands of years old nd built by god knows who on the Western Islands. The modern Irish have adopted it in their obsession to prove they are not of the same bloodline as the English, (shhhh!…they are).
We spent the day bicycling from one set of ruins to another. The Northwestern coast is amazing and looks like something from another world. You have sheer cliffs that plunge hundreds of meters to the boiling surf. On the beach are house-sized boulders looking like lost aliens strewn from the sea. The waves are ferocious and pummel the shoreline making huge frothy plumes. Its a raw rugged place you find which I found hard to believing people would inhabit by choice.
Max hanging our over the North Sea
On our bike ride back we came across a small pub and stopped in for a few pints. We where enchanted by the angelic voice of a six year old boy singing in the ancient Gaelic tongue. Over the course of our two hours, old men would periodically break into Gaelic melodies. The other islanders would make odd guttural sounds of ascent, at what I could only guess where the high points of these epic tales being sung in a language predating civilization.
We ran across this local cutie that the prophet became somewhat enamored with. Enough so that we missed all but the last ferry for the mainland, culminating in a death march back to the airport in Dublin and a near miss of my 5 am flight to Poland.
I left Ireland hung over, frostbitten and sunburned; pretty much par for the course.
Raymond in the freezing ass North Sea
I took a little junket to Novisad Serbia this summer to see some bands at an electronica festival called exitfest. It takes place in the second largest citadel in Europe, built to keep the Austro-Hungarian empire in line, before being converted to a much more practical concert venue.
It’s a huge castle with twisting catacombs where 50,000 of your closest friends can drink and dance for days on end. It’s located next to a river with a superb beach and camping facilities dead center to Novisad. The town has a million or so folks and late in the day we would explore its fantastic restaurants before napping on the beach.
Gogol Bordello on stage at Exit
I spent a little time trying to figure out what happened here in the 90’s. Some of you may remember a little war and some ethnic cleansing. I gathered from a lot of people, clearly not that interested to get into it, that Serbia was run by a nationalistic douche bag who thought that creating an empire to fuck over everyone he could get his hands on was a good idea. Well at least it was original…
Perhaps I oversimplify but it is as near as I can get to why Serbia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia are all collectively the size of Connecticut and each their own country.
My new Croatian friends
Next stop for the summer was a the sea. Marseilles is the main port of France on the Mediterranean sea. Many ferries leave to North Africa and the Islands. I chose one going to Corsica and Sardinia.
Corsica is known as the land of sea and mountains. It is a staggeringly beautiful place rising thousands of meters out of the Mediterranean sea. It boasts an immense history as waves of European empires struggled for control over the last 2000 years. Today it is a French gem hidden in the sea. It is the birthplace and ancestral home of Napoleon Bonaparte, arguably the most impressive Frenchmen who ever lived.
Ajacio port and birthplace of Napoleon
Napoleon and his lesser known brothers like the king of Spain
Casa de Napoleon
I spent a few days in Sardinia. Its part of Italy so no one cares.
On my way back from Sardegna I visited the south of Corsica. I was incredibly thankful to be back in France where I was no longer harassed by Neanderthal midgets named Gepeto, who speak an even less pleasant sounding version of Italian.
Bonaparte from the ferry
The first city you see when you arrive on the Southern Tip of Corsica is Bonafaccio. The arrival is spectacular as it is a fortified city on a massive set of cliffs.
View of the sea from Bonaparte
I discovered a rare gem in Corsica. A most excellent blond ale I shall endeavor to track down upon my return to continental Europe. I went to visit the brewery but they where not open for business.
Colomba Bier a fantastic blonde ale
My favorite city in Corsica is a small college town located in the center of the Island. It was briefly made the capital in a futile attempt to keep everyone with a boat from taking over the Island. The city is called Corté and one arrives by taking a fantastic train ride through 3000 meter (Americans get a calculator I am tired of supporting your illiterate habit or just think tall) mountains. The town is built in and around a series of amazing peaks. It is everything little medieval European towns are supposed to be. It also boasted some of the best food I have eaten while in France and I vowed to return for a romantic tryst or two.
City tower center of Corté
I stayed in the lower city and would walk through a forested area with a set of small wooden bridges to the upper city. Seen below is night shot of the bridge which I thought very cool.
Night Bridge Corte
So summer has fled my little continent and I am faced with decisions for the coming year. I have a visa pending for Belarus in the Summer to take Russian lessons in Minsk.
I am lately feeling reflective and have slight tug to figure out something to do with myself.
I have a few fun things in store for the coming year. Until then I have a ticket to Cartagena in Colombia and a room waiting in Amsterdam.
So you will hear from me either from a Caribbean paradise or hidden in the shadows of a dutch coffee shop. Till then peace 