What an ugly way to say butterfly.

I am a blatant racist. I can't help it. I flat out hate Germans.

This is not a holdover from the last post, although, let's be honest, that doesn't help. In my travels both before and on this trip so far (not in America, before you all get offended), maybe two of the eighty or so people I've met from Germany have been decent. At best, decent. The Eurotrash stereotype of the guy in acid-washed zippers-everywhere jeans, horrid sunglasses and constantly listening to techno, or as Corey Irwin would say "the douff-douff" music? He comes from Hamburg. Frankfurt. Berlin. And as far as women, they gave us Heidi Klum. That's about it.

And so they've collectively fucked up in general, annoying but no one thing overly egregious. I've given the Germans another chance and, following the pattern of the early 20th Century, then they really dick you over. I'm up at 5:30 am in Paris. And it's not to watch the sunrise, or beat the queue at the Louvre. Its because I confusedly woke up to the sound of retching, and still groggy thought "why does it smell like awful wine?" Oh. Because there's a lake of vomit on the floor of my hostel room. Right in the center of all the beds. Not even an attempt to make it to the bathroom, where if the guy failed on the way you could at least applaud the valor. No, he was already back asleep, the smug smirk of accomplishment on his face. And this degenerate of a flatmate.... he comes from Dusseldorf. Cologne. Stuttgart. I still have 3 days in Berlin on the horizon, and a return to Munich for Oktoberfest to change my mind, but we're not looking good at the moment here.

You know the really hot girl at the bar with the complete douchebag? You want to try to rescue her, give her an intervention, but she's insecure, has a long history with him, is a little too far down that road to see reason..... Yeah. That's Vienna. It deserves so much better.

Austria has been home to some of the greatest composers in history: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms (ignore Falco for a second). Even if they came from somewhere else, it was in Vienna that their talent bloomed. And so one walks the streets of Vienna as if the architecture were amplifiers, the streets and buildings evoking such wondrous music to match the opulence of their edifice. It has inspired not just classical music, but a bit more recently the quirky score of The Third Man. Mandolins and accordions and staccato improv, and that somehow produced one of the great accompaniments to a film ever. This is what Vienna should sound like. But begin to immerse yourself in the city's people, interact with the locals, and you get the AM radio static that passes for the German language. These are the very lips of grandeur, and they're forced to spew cacophony, the letters g and f by the dozen.

If not for this tragedy of linguistics I could see myself living in Vienna. It's majestic, still touristy but nowhere near as bad as Paris, and in some ways even more beautiful. But it's saddled with one of the most horrendous languages to survive the tumultuous centuries of European history. Latin is dead, but we still have "geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung" as a way to say "speed limit." Juliet's lament about a rose by any other name: disproved.

Now, about that queue for the Louvre......


(Vienna):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101472&id=35804394&l=dc4d0dcfae

Comparing notes on a disaster.

Nothing moved on the day I went to Auschwitz. The pristine weather Poland in summer had offered the previous 3 days was swallowed by a colourless void of sky. The heat remained, but was now sourceless, the sky so full of clouds that it seemingly had none at all. It hung like a dull, recycled canvas. Even with the train carriage's window down, the air was stagnant, claustrophobic as the countryside passed by. I poured water down a throat that stubbornly remained dry.

My predominant emotion was apprehension. Visiting the grounds of Treblinka in December grated my emotions further every minute I was there, and that was without any remaining buildings on the grounds. How would I cope now with entering the very structures of a death factory? And Treblinka was something else Auschwitz was not. Silent. Secluded. In the three hours Corey Irwin and I were there, we saw maybe four other people on the grounds as well. I am forever listening, but Treblinka was quiet enough to hear. An imagination invites. Treblinka obliged. At Auschwitz there is not the retreat of creativity. Merely undeniable reality.

These bricks held screams. The bullet holes in concrete were made just after lives were ended. The two tons of human hair in the room before me- that was washed, cared for, fretted over. But then came Auschwitz. The endless piles of shoes, both adults' and children's..... those were purchased, polished, a source of delight, even brief, material pride. But then they stepped on the platform at Birkenau II. Individual tragedy on that scale is not something that the mind can digest fully. Honestly. It isn't. Even for me, who attended potentially the leading university for Holocaust study in America. I've eaten dozens of dinners with survivors, read reams of history and first-hand accounts, in Night and Fog seen the most graphic footage that exists on the camps. And still, when actually on the grounds, my intellect fails me.

Understanding is not found in the face of atrocity. Horror as confrontation is not horror as comprehension. Even if you succeed in part, begin to fathom what this place means, you are thrown off-balance, stopped once again. For there is laughter at Auschwitz. On the walk from the train station to the site, you pass a neighborhood, hung laundry drying, playgrounds in use. The three-kilometer gap between the camps? That's filled with houses, a lot of them, seemingly unaware they are entrenched between the echoes of the basest evil man is capable of. People eagerly pose for photos beneath the cruelly-worded gates ("Work Will Set You Free"). People want to remember that moment. I had a difficult time taking any photographs, had to force myself to so that I could reflect responsibly on the experience years from now. Inserting myself in such a setting for all time was not just unappealing, it would be sickening. A teenager stood in front of a maze of barbed wire that surrounded a watch tower and a sign that read "Halt" while miming the stance of an SS guard. He just barely held his laugh in long enough for his photo to be taken. That's what the compounds the horror of Auschwitz. We seriously don't fucking get it.

Elie Wiesel, the popular face and voice of the Holocaust survivor, spoke at my university, an incredibly rare honor I was privileged to attend. He discussed a thesis of re-interpretation regarding the myth of Pandora's Box, and how it relates to looking back on his experience after these many decades. Pandora disobeys Zeus, and in doing so unleashes all forms of plagues and evil throughout the world, dooming humanity to immeasurable misery. And at the very bottom of the vacated box, she sees the silver light of hope. We all sleep easier knowing we have this one gift to combat all our struggles. But Mr. Wiesel stressed the forgotten premise of the entire story, the one that shifts the paradigm. The box contains all the evils in the world that can torture us. And hope is in that box. So why should we view hope as anything other than the cruelest evil of all? The one deeper and more lasting than all the others....

During the speech at Chapman, it was a thesis I found clever, memorable, thought-provoking. At Auschwitz it was a thesis proven true. We proclaim "Never forget," vow "Never again." But this ignores the killing fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans, the bloody rivers of Rwanda and Darfur. Even the most casual look at history exhibits that hope in the face of horror is at best proven moot. At worst, exposed for what it really is. This may not apply to the everyday life at home (I haven't grown that pessimistic), but for a few thousand acres of the Polish countryside and the hundreds of other places like it, a list expanding by the day, it is impossible to argue otherwise.

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(postscript) These are the emotions I feel right now, a time in my life unique in that I have just visited Auschwitz. But it is not a weight or depression that I will carry with me, so as my friends, don't worry. I realize how negative the above sounds, but I wanted to give you insight in to this moment, as well as reassurance that I will use this experience as something to learn from and grow. In short, I will bounce back. I have a tendency to do that.

Auschwitz and the rest of Poland:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2101153&id=35804394&l=22664e38a1

Play crack the sky.

That I may dream of Suomenlinna.

Its history, being an 18th Century fortress built to protect nearby Helsinki, is merely a side curiosity to me. My visit was not about its history but its aesthetics- of the grounds, the sea, and the sky above. Its mortal history only dilutes its effect, for it has a central and inescapable quality of eternity about it; learning of the human hands that laid the bricks only cauterizes the wonder.

Standing on its cliffs, my perspective followed the line of the cannons still pointed out to sea, and I watched as storms rioted over the Gulf of Finland. Storms so far away, that I could see their clear borders, and the wave of sunlight that would follow soon for those on boats underneath. The sky meticulously ran the gamut of greyscale, the clouds the gauzy layers of organ tissue. This was not a tourist destination, it was a setting for our earliest history. This was watching mythologies form. Where unnoticed humans arrive to witness concepts hold court, time and wisdom debate one another. If this is not where Earth began, it was close enough that the feeling is still palpable.

I have little to tell you about Suomenlinna, but much for you to see. Please look through the pictures, maybe listening to the Sigur Ros album ( ) as I did while walking the grounds, for a deeper experience.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuajaniak/sets/72157621957599583/

Lessons learned from rocky iv.

"You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast..." - Bloc Party

In Moscow, it is never possible to not be in Moscow. New York and London are chameleons, offering nuances and pockets secluded enough to either forget the urban sprawl, or so authentically diverse that you must rethink what city, even country, you are currently in. Even St. Petersburg has some of the ambiguous elegance of several European cities, a massive version of Prague, an exponential Budapest. Not Moscow. Moscow is a leviathan, an eternal presence that looms, not above you, but directly on top of you. Not always a crushing weight, but a presence undeniable.

This trip always had a sense of urgency for me. Not only because my time to do such drastic things is dwindling frightfully low, but also due to the precarious status of many of my destinations; if I couldn't see them in the next 5 years or so, they may not be around to. Angkor Wat is crumbling, Hiroshima's ghosts are fading (literally, we'll come to that in December), and I fear that Russia's politics, and thus its borders, are freezing back up once again.

This annoyance turns tragic when one gets to meet the Russian people themselves. I found almost all of them to be extremely friendly, if not equipped to be tourist-friendly, though nothing in Moscow is. Basically no signs (one in every 70? 80?) had an English translation, and outside of my hostel staff, in 3 days probably 5 people I came across spoke enough English to struggle through a small set of directions, or a lunch order. The usual reaction to hearing English was utter bewilderment. And this is the reason that I wanted Moscow to be not simply a destination during my travels, but the city to begin my time abroad.

Leading up to this trip, the standard reaction was "Oh my God, you're going to have the time of you're life/so much fun/an absolute blast." And I will, but I also somehow need to stretch a sizable but fixed amount of money across the span of 5 months, 30+ countries, and 3 continents, without taking any new money in during that entire time. To see everywhere I want to, to financially actually make it through to mid-December, this can't be a giant gluttonous pub crawl, or at least not a non-stop one. This lesson could not be absorbed in the tempting and familiar comfort of London, or the opulence of Paris. But rather Moscow. Whether it's baptism by fire, or the hazing of the expatriate, that tone of unfamiliarity had to be set. Not discomfort but the necessity to avoid the complacency that any comfort inevitably brings. And what better locale for such an aim than Moscow.

Relentless, unapologetic Moscow. The size alone will crush you. By fast rail without any stops, its diameter is 90 minutes in all directions before you even hit the suburbs. 156 metro stations latticed throughout its faceless, repetitive geography. There is actually little of major note to see there- the Kremlin and Red Square, and whatever much smaller attractions appeal to your personal idiosyncrasies. But the main draw, what made it more rewarding an experience than St. Petersburg, was the nearly-tangible atmosphere that is as omnipresent as the hammer & sickle is in its architecture (seriously, everywhere). You can see photos of the onion domes of St. Basil's, wikipedia the history and significance of the Kremlin, but you will never even begin to comprehend what Moscow means until you are enveloped in its bloodless grasp.

That sounds like a condemnation, certainly a hyperbole, but what other city can inspire even remotely that, simply by its existence. Simply by walking its streets.

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(post-script)
Walking these streets is what I did most of the time, and meandering around the gorgeous underground metro, taking in the sights of both the people and what the people themselves were seeing. Though I did so with my own soundtrack. Despite being several years old, and having heard it countless times in all ranges of moods, Bloc Party's Silent Alarm will now always be linked to Moscow for me, "Pioneers" and "Plans" especially. In truth, "Pioneers" will probably be my anthem for this voyage as a whole, but also perfectly encapsulates its audacious beginnings. Also, Regina Spektor's Soviet Kitsch was a beautiful accompaniment to the delicate grandeur that is Red Square at night, which was my farewell to the city. So if you browse the photos below, if at all possible, pull up those songs to go along with them.

Moscow:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2099609&id=35804394&l=d9ae5998c6

St. Petersburg:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100146&id=35804394&l=a0efba73fc