I realize now that I never told you about the first first multi-day leg of my trip! But the start should be familiar. Thinking straight death towards a certain voyou punk and biking speedily out of Strasbourg to make up time lost at the police department, I felt the layers of storm clouds that surrounded me stripping away with the wind, and the grime beneath them begin to dry crack and peel from the sun. There is nothing like fresh air and excercise to dissipate grudges. While I cycled I tried to honestly think if I was angry with Karim, but never decided one way or the other. However I did manage to summon enough creative resentment from the incident to fuel the formation of many perfect parting shots.

The first day passed without event but with much beauty. Although it was a Sunday and spookily silent and empty accross the entire length of Europe I managed to find an open store and an Alsatian meat spread that puts met-worst to shame. Mounting the first of many hills I sat to watch a rainbow and digest all that had happened so far.

That night I camped for free above a medieval town. Between heavy rain showers I escaped my tent to try to find a spot to watch the sunset. On top of every mountain here is a castle and I was certain of stumbling on a piece of crumbling history to perch and watch the sky.

Day two took me to Colmar where I found some artisan salami and a McDonalds to write my blog. I find myself forever under their golden arches because for me that means free wifi. Colmar is picturesque but inundated by groups of gawkers but by the evening I had found a pair of local twins to wander around with and try to find ice-cream.

Consolation feast for stolen iPod

Day three the sun and I rose to reach reach a ridge, and a col, and a coffee. I chatted to a group of day-bikers and scoffed at what they call mountains in this part of France. The vista included a miniscule ski hill that wouldn’t make bunnies blink. Gliding slowly and easily south along the spine of the Vosges mountains, I relished the wind and the views but balked at the ghastly forest of naked trees that pushed in on all sides. In truth the nature here isn’t half that of BC and after visiting a few parts of the world I am starting to realize why people come to Canada. That evening I hesitantly enquired the price of camping at a ferme auberge to hear with pleasure that it was free. The family that owned the place were of the warmest variety and wanting to patronize the place I ordered the 17 euro feast. That evening I stumbled tent-ward feeling drunk and round and happy, having had two fantastic French conversations that ran the course of education, politics, the modern age and more. I was unable to finish the four course (fantastic) meal, so shared my cheese plate with my neighbours.

The next day brought me back down again to warmer winds and grocery stores. I topped up on cooking gass and bread and made Altkiirch in the early afternoon. I asked a lady for directions to the campsite and seeing me alone with my bike she invited me to come to dinner with that famed Alsatian hospitality. I gratefully accepted and pedalled off happy not to have to eat pork and beans again and have only my farts for company.

Ariving at the campsite I found another guy just like me! Browned by the sun and beaten by the rain, ponderously laden bikers with no-where really to be.

Raphael trying out my bike.

“My god he speaks English” I was thinking as I chatted away happily. And German and French it turns out. Native of Paris and long time resident of Cologne, Rapheal at 30 had just fled a stifling living arrangement that had just produced a child. Not being a firmly rooted person he had come on this trip of indefinite length and intended to work picking fruit for a while and learn how to make a yurt. A yurt is a big circular tent and they are very popular among the poor leftists with farms who are all over France. You need permits for buildings you see, but a yurt avoids that classification. Raphael and I took our unladen bikes for a freewheeling romp around town and ended up at a pub with fake palm trees on the walls and a completely hammered French Canadian bar tender. After a disgustingly sweet beer I had to leave for my appointment and Rapheal charmingly took the bill. Dinner was wonderful and warm and the husband was a bigger Asterix and Obelix fan than me (and probably Karen too). At the end they gifted me a bottle of Alsatian wine which I shared with my campsite buddy, who was even more sloshed than me.

A regional specialty here is Carpe Frittes which is awesome! All you can eat deep fried crispy carp bits and chips with mayo and lemon.

After filling to bursting Raphael and I exchanged emails and set off on our different ways, me to be picked up by farm #1 and him the heart of France.

Check out more Alsace photos.

If you don’t want to see a lamb get butchered than don’t click the more button! It makes for great photos though.
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So I have been here at Farm #1 for a few days now and am getting accustomed to the life. I get up around 7 and feed the baby goats, baby sheep, baby cow (so cute!), baby chickens and ducks, and baby rabbits (also so cute!). I am getting to be a master milker, though it will take a lot of practice to catch up to the people here. I eat every meal with the family so am starting to get to know them. Nadege is the mother and master of the farm. She is super kind and is the person behind the cheese (of which they have a happy abundance). Jerome is like a son to the family and lives with them, he has been going out with Nadeges older daughter for six years. I have to get him to stop thinking I’m stupid and start thinking that I just don’t have a good vocabulary and my grammer sucks. Very nice and funny guy though. His girlfriend and Nadege’s oldest daughter Fanny is here for the weekend to vote but normaly has an apprentiship “listening to birds” somewhere in Alsace. The youngest daughter is Amandine who is on vacation from school right now but is normaly just here for the weekends. At 18 she is also the youngest person on the farm and makes a special effort to talk to me clearly and make sure I understand everything.

The other day I had my first milk bath, and no that is not some weird farmer rejuvenation ritual. An angry goat didn’t like me getting fresh with it and kicked my hard earned (and fresh squeezed) milk all over me. The bright side is that the really cute apprentice who is here to learn how to make cheese thought that it was pretty funny, and I couldn’t help but wring out a smile too.

I really like the family and last night they took me with them to the circus. I feel honoured because it doesn’t look like they all get together very often and for them to invite me (and pay for me) after only three days is a good sign. The circus itself was also pretty sweet! The clowns here are often British just as I imagine in Britain they are French. It’s so lovely when neighbours respect each-other so much.

I am working on my callouses, French, milking muscles, and dishes skills. I should have a killer handshake after three weeks.

Check out some farm photos here.

Gather round and I will tell you how I lost my iPod, my pride, and a good measure of my faith in humanity. This is hard to write because I feel ashamed of having been taken for a fool, but I keep telling myself that it isn’t my fault. All that I can do is write it as honestly as possible.

The day before I had spent biking around Germany with Karim the ex-con on a bike that I had rented for him. The evening we spent chatting up a pretty Quebecois girl and wandering around skid row drinking comically oversized beers (that I had payed for) and talking to hookers. Well he did most of the talking to be honest. He was getting maudlin and was saying all the shit he was going to do for me because he liked how open I was and how much he liked Canadian people. He wanted for me to be able to contact him, but he has no contact info on account of having no home, so he put his full name and brothers cell phone number in my iPod touch. Later I stumbled off to a drunken sleep happily enough to the enormous snores and random late-night phone-calls of my touched in the head Muslim room-mate.

In the morning Karim knocks on my door and enters. After asking for permission to help with my bags, he takes two and leaves, one of them my bag of secondary importance in which I have just stashed my iPod. The bags that are left are almost too much for one person to carry, and I almost call him back to take more, but it is too late. I follow as quickly as possible, but it isn’t easy to carry five bags and a pair of shoes. He is out of sight when I wade into the hallway and when I enter the lobby, he isn’t there.

The corners of my mouth are trying to do sit-ups as everything turns yellow brown and becomes as shallow as smear of honey. It is a straight path between my room and the lobby and there is no reason for deviation. I dump my stuff and dart up the stairs to look for him. After a fruitless search I return to the lobby just as he saunters in bag-less, having had time to put his bags with mine and do god knows what with their contents. I don’t want to accuse him of anything till I am sure, so I start to use the computer beside where my bags are, in the hopes of casually searching them on some pretence. He is literally watching over my shoulder, and the nervous awkwardness is wriggling off his words like something slimy caught on a hook. “Fuck it” I think and bend down to check my bag. Suddenly he is trying to distract me by asking me stupid questions like “how does this computer work?” My fingers brush through the contents and through the yellow brown film that has dropped over my vision my eyes decipher headphones attached to nothing. My head rises slowly to deliver the most unbelieving look I can conjure and the stone that has appeared in my stomach reverberates to my simple demand: “mon iPod, c’est ou?” At first he pretends to not understand and then becomes increasingly offended. The weight of the lie that I am supposed to swallow has ripped a whole straight through my insides and words go in and out without making an impression. When you are bicycle camping you need to be organized, and I knew where every item I possessed was, save one.

Heated conversation followes and I began to feel like we are lobsters with banded claws fighting for final pointless supremacy in a rapidly warming pot. I begin to gasp for air as it becomes clear there will be no winner. So I escape to the reception desk which calls in this big black guy to help me search Karim’s room. By this time he has had plenty of time to hide it anywhere in the hostel he pleases and I kick myself for not keeping a closer eye on him. He is blabbering about how racist it is, which I think is rather funny. “Just because I’m an Arab,” he says to the black guy. Nothing shows up in the cursory search, like I knew it wouldn’t. So it looks like I get to experience the French legal system first hand. It turns out that without an eye witness “on peut rien faire,” but I filed it with the cops anyways and got to add my nick in this hoodlums sword. Just before I biked away I told him that I hope he has fun with that. Of course during the rather aggressive ride that followed I thought of many better parting shots.

I’m gonna write this one down while I am still sweaty. Yesterday I played soccer with an Algerian guy named Karim. Today at breakfast he comes over and shakes my hand while I’m in the food line, so I go over to sit by him. I hope that my roomy (Abdel) comes down so the two of them can meet, being both kicked out of their houses and Algerian, I thought they might have something in common. Unfotrunately he takes too much time praying and Karim is gone before Abdel comes down. I managed to avoid Abdel’s invitations and so have the day to myself, but only after promising that we would get ice-cream at 6. I have come to believe that he has a slight mental problem, or he is just lonely right now and therefore clingy. In any case it can’t be all culture shock. Karim was kicked out of his mothers house so his former soccer coach brought him here and payed for his room till Monday. I asked, but didn’t manage to decipher why he was kicked out, but I did learn that he recently spent two years in jail for assault. Seems like a nice guy though. In any case I feel bad for him being here with nothing to do, and because he was there for me to play soccer with yesterday, and because I was frankly interested in him, I invited him to come on my bike trip to see the WW1 forts around Strasbourg. Easier said then done though, we got pleasantly lost on the far side of the Rhine and just biked around for hours before coming back to the hostel for lunch. During the ride he would be constantly smoking cigarettes he had bought with the 10 euros his coach had given him.

Back at the hostel in the afternoon I met this nice Quebecois girl who had as hard a time understanding Karim as I did. Karim it turns out speaks street French. He suggests we bike to the other hostel in town which has been closed for a few years. I willingly agree because it means I don’t have to navigate. We cross the city and I enter the abandoned hostel grounds waving for him to come with. I explore a little and when I turn back he is missing. I retrace my treads and on the point of going further down the path when I spot his Messi jersey entering the building opposite the hostel. Well that’s odd I say to myself biking up to it. The lady smoking on the porch leads me to believe it’s a house of ill repute and my excon friend just stopped in for a quicky. Weird, but I’ll wait. But as I start to stroll around the grounds the lady tells me I can’t because it’s a school. Weird kind of school, I think. But as Karim comes out trailing a few miscreant looking types it becomes clear that it’s some sort of reform school. We stroll outside the grounds for a smoke with his partners in miscreantism and he starts calmly cutting up some hash for a hand rolled spliff. His friend pulls a mickey out of the front of his pants and some weed out of a tissue package. These reform schools are exactly like I imagined, I think. They pass a barrage of street French among them so I don’t say anything and try to look like Karim’s body gaurd in my black t-shirt. I can make out that they are mostly talking about guys they know on the inside, Karim having just spent 2 years there for assault. When the miscreants have departed a guy wanders by and bums a smoke from Karim. They start talking and start a long haggle over buying the guys Raybans. I start to feel a little like that dude who joined gangs and wrote books about them. The price goes between 120 euros, to Karim’s bike, to my sunglasses (which Karim is wearing, and which he kindly informs the guy are mine). I am wondering all this time how the hell Karim is planning on paying for anything with no money to his name. I say in my gruff bodygaurd voice that it isn’t worth the trouble and we finally split. Sorry, I mean leave. You’d think all this would have given me a clue, but that’s another post.

Ice cream run round 2. 5 Ice creams in 2 days is a new record for me.

The following was written in fear and apprehension.

Last night a man comes into my dormitory which until then, had been empty. He looks at me, looks at the food which i had just bought and starts speaking very fast in an Algerian accented French. When I ask him to slow it down a little I’m not super happy I did. “It stinks in here, what’s that you’ve got there, food? You can’t cook here I absolutely forbid you.” He continues in this jocular and somewhat rude and abrasive fashion until he goes into the shower from which he adds “you really don’t speak French very well do you?” Which needless to say I understood full well. At this point I was fairly sure I was going to be murdered in my sleep and conjured up all kinds of scary stories for why he was in this hostel because he didn’t seem like a traveler. It turns out they aren’t far from the truth. I take my food down to the communal kitchen and have what i expect to be my last supper. It was OK. When I return the man is all sweetness, now either he really needed that shower or he is trying to play me and steal my shit. As we talk a bit and he asks seemingly innocent questions: your on bike eh? You buy it here or in Quebec (it took a while for him to grasp that Vancouver is not in Quebec), is it a good bike? Your a web designer? Do you have a computer with you? Nice shoes, light and sturdy… I seriously start to feel like I am some sort of free shop for thieves and he is browsing my wares. I take comfort in the fact that I always have my knife on me and would probably slit his throat if it came to it. That was really the only comfort I had because he is either on his cellphone speaking rapid and angry and loud Arabic or freaking the shit out of me. I am in this curious Canadian grey zone where we all go under pressure. Just be nice and polite and he will see what a nice person you are and not kill you and take your things. Just then he says a few words in Russian and says he has spent some time there and when I start to really flip some mental shit he pulls out a rug and gestures for me to move out of his mecca line, saying he is going to pray now. I breath a HUGE inward sign of relief, it wouldn’t be very in line with the will of Allah to kill or steal from a helpless traveller would it? In fact i think it might be expressly forbidden. I have never been made so comfortable be learning that someone is religious.

Strasbourg Cathedral - the only cathedral so far that was worth even a digital photo.

Needless to say I hit the hay really early. He comes back from somewhere and we chat a bit more, now that I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have bad intentions it is a lot easier. In fact by the evening he is calling me comrade and has invited me to stay at his fathers mansion in Algeria where he has two dune buggies. Which to be honest sounds pretty sweet. In the morning we have the included “breakfast” and he helps me steal some bread. It turns out that he just recently separated from his wife as of two weeks ago, which is why he is at the hostel and might also go a ways towards explaining his bad mood and angry phone calls of the night previous. Before the revelation he had offered to drive me around to see the sights and because I thought I would be dead by then anyways, and because this guy knows how to apply some serious pressure, I consented against my better judgement. But now I am sitting pretty as we drive by the European parliament buildings blasting Queen and he points out the interesting things around us. He is a bit more touchy than the average “comrade” and added to the fact that we are listening to a gay Arab I start to think back to scenes from Kite Runner and Withnail and I that leave me once more bugg-eyed and staring out the window. After all I would be spending the next night, tonight in fact, in the same room all alone. I imagine slitting his throat again just to calm myself down. Well I will let you know how all this progresses as it happens. I love you all and god bless if you’re into that (I am seriously starting to see the value in religion especially if it means not getting buggered). Well, he’s home…

Several hours later.

He gave me a banana, and that is not a euphemism. He then proceeded to treat me to ice-cream just over the border in Germany. (2 scoops, 2 euros, very simple, very German.) We were just leaving and I was feeling pretty good about everything and fairly certain that I was just having travelers paranoia on account of my internal mother, when I see that he has two phones and my Russian spy paranoia sparks up again. I immediately ask him: “why do you have two phones?”–I figure you can get away with being blunt in a foreign language–and he mumbles something about phone cards. During our long, slow, and one would almost say romantic if it was in any way, walk he is always on one phone or the other, he would literally be on one while the other was ringing off the hook. He talked to some in French, some in Arab, and some in a mixture of the two. I managed to pick up enough of the French to realize that he wasn’t planning my kidnapping but talking at length about his personal problems, though I was always on the lookout for keywords. At one point he had me talk to someone on the other line who he said was his friend. I told her “it seems like he really needs friends right now.” At another point he mentions Mohammed a bunch and actually starts crying a little, I give him some manly privacy and walk a few steps ahead. We just returned as I write this, and besides the fact that he thinks my name is Turri, I would say that we are friends of a sort if not, as he calls us, brothers.

Oh yah, and he also offered me a poorly wrapped lollipop at one point. I told him I would save it for tomorrow.

See the Strasbourg photos

Ah the Paris of Hemmingway and those other dudes… Well that was about as knowledgeable as Paris was nostalgic. The buzz and hum of a world capital continues on in one of the most up to the minute places on earth. Perhaps it was because of the election poster boards everywhere (an equal amount for every contender) that covered up a good chunk of the city, or perhaps it was because we never did get to see either of the two big art galleries, but Paris to me felt as ancient and undying as a housefly or dubstep. The only exception to this was time honoured tradition of sitting in a cafe and watching the world go by. Adam and I spent a good portion of our time doing just that. In the course of one hour I spent by myself just before catching the train to Strasbourg, two people stopped to have a conversation and one asked me for a light.

“Il fait mauvais” I found myself saying a lot and it truly was miserable. One day started off nice and when we had walked to the other side of the city in our sweatshirts it decided to pour. When it rains in Paris the gargoyles explode with sweat, the streetvendors have their merchandise whisked away or ruined, and everyone hides in church foyers. So Adam and I hunkered down to munch the second half of our daily baguette with jam and meat we purchased from a street market. Little did we know that church was about to be in session and people—taking their cue from the weather—started to pour in. I have never heard quite as many bonne-apetites in my life and eventually they began to blend themselves into the gentle pitter patter of raindrops on old stone and feet mounting ancient stairs.

The French are in love with saying bonne apetite. I met a young man of 20 here in Strasbourg with scars on his face and one on his arm that is probably as long as his criminal record who is staying here because his mother kicked him out of his house. We were playing soccer and when I sat down to take a break and a baguette he wished me as quaintly and seriously as any old french lady in a patisserie a “bon apetite.”

But Strasbourg is another post. In case you missed the French election I’ll tell you the interesting parts. To begin with it is still not over because it happens in two stages. The first knocks it down to two contenders and the second signifies the next President de la Republique. “France is a country of extremes” as one of the unhappy centrist party leaders said, and it is true. 20% of the vote went towards Marine Lapen of the Fascist Party. Well ok they aren’t called that but everyone knows that’s what they are. Next on the right you have good old Sarko, the current President who has been trying to syphon off Lapen’s voters by threatening to remove France from the Schlingen zone which allows for free movement and trade among the signed countries. In the middle of the spectrum there are a smattering of centrist parties that together scrape together about half as much as Mama Marine your friendly fascist next door. Now Sarko Sarkozy came in a very tight second to Francois Hollande the probable next President of France and the leader of the socialist party. His voice is much better than his looks. His party on the Canadian spectrum would be somewhat left of NDP. But wait there is more. The far left is made up of le Front Gauche and the Communists who pull about as much as Lapen. In Canada we measure what percentage of people vote. In France they measure what percentage don’t. Their abstention level for this election was one of the lowest ones recently at 18%. Altogether their system seems much more democratic than ours.

The wind that blew the postcard stand over softened and brought fresh news of bakeries and coffee shops. In the morning pain au chocolat in the day deux cafes in the evening we cheaped out and went to the supermarket and cooked in our hotel room. Paris was a strange mix of the romantic.

And the not so romantic.

So I am alone now. Sitting in a hostel in Strasbourg and staring myself directly in the face. There is something about traveling by yourself that forces this confrontation and it is entirely up to you what you do with it. This is why some people travel to find themselves. I am traveling to learn. I need to have that purpose or I feel like a leaf in a windstorm; completely unatached.

I have made two Algerian acquantences who I will tell you about when I have a proper keyboard (did you know the keyboards are different in France?) But you, dear reader, are my travelling companion now.

Holland, Belgium and Paris were conquered with the help of my very good friend Adam, who should be home as I write this. He was a perfect person to travel with: fair minded, interested, interesting, eager to meet people and comfortable in any situation. Au revoir mon ami, enjoy those poffertjes.

What started as a common interest turned into an epic struggle that layed pride and life on the line. Darian got off to a cocky lead and before Adam could say ¨good game¨ the score was 3-1. But confidence was indeed misplaced because by the end of Belgium Adam had rallied to climb over and above his erstwhile friend to make the score an impressive 7-5 in his favour. Darian was never known not to be a quitter and so in Bruges he proposed a friendly match that wouldn´t count to the competition. It turned out to be exactly what he needed because the relaxed feeling let him risk his neck to win a resounding victory that left Adam shaking in his booties. But the lead was still to Adam and Two more grueling matches in the parks of Paris pushed the margin wider. With a few more days to go Darian was staring defeat in the face. At 9-5 it looked impossible and he was losing hope. But sometimes hopelessness and reckless abandon tempered by a refusal to do anything overtly stupid is exactly what you need to unseat a worthy opponent. By the time the last day aproached Darian had turned out a series of brilliant, but still close, games that tied it up at 9-9.

The heat was on. The endgame took place in a dim blue and dark purple café in the shady area near our hotel. The floor was littered with garbage and the coffee was ten cents cheaper than normal. Sides were picked afresh and Adam drew black. Darian was worried because he preffered to take the defence and had decimated Adam recently by stretching him out over what is termed the French defence. Kings pawns faced off and the game began. The middle was evenly contested until Darian managed to take an extra bishop, but nothing was in the bag. As black wiggled into position Adam´s queen was thrust deep into white territory checking and threatening in the same breath. The fox was truly loose amongst the chickens, and Adam continued to press the advantage untill a cowed white army under a proud but defeated general was forced to concede as his last castle fell under a rooks powerfull assault.