August: Europe's Quiet Month

It's August and northern Europe has essentially shut down for the month.

Every July, there's a rush to finish work before the client goes on holidays or before an ad agency boss goes on vacation or to lessen the mountain of work that await upon return from your August adventures.

Then July ends and there are fewer emails with the urgent exclamation point icon. There are fewer rushed meetings with end-of-day deadlines and fewer meltdowns. There are still emails and meetings and stress, but it all takes on a less frantic, less urgent tone.

Getting into August, it's worth mentioning that workers in Germany and Hungary get a set amount of paid holidays by law that increases based on their age. For someone my age, it works out to about four weeks.

This is a far cry from Canada, where the amount is set at two weeks and any increases are the result of individual contract negotiations, seniority at a company (if the company does that), or a collective bargaining agreement (which is becoming rarer since Canadian workers are sadly becoming adept at dismantling their labour unions).

I'm not mentioning this to make my North American friends envious (unless you're unionized, then you're fine), but to point out that more of holidays make it easy to take off chunks of August to visit tropical destinations or lounge on a Greek island or, if you're German, takeover a finca on a Balaeric Island.

This August, we're not doing any of that. Paying rent on the current flat and the old one, along with the previous Lisbon trip and an upcoming Budapest visit, has meant things are a bit tighter this August. It's been a month of weekend day trips, of beers on blankets in the park, and lazy, rainy afternoons on the couch – of which there are many in northern Germany.

There are advantages to sticking around when everyone else has ditched the Dorf for sunnier places. For starters, the city itself feels a little less crowded – save for the bachelor parties that stagger through the Altstadt's breweries. 

The pace of the city itself slows – maybe an affect of the warmer weather on the thick-blooded Germans. Going a bit slower, you're able to notice the sunnier side of the German summer, like the 10pm sunsets or temperatures that drift towards 25 degrees – when it isn't raining, of course.

And so you linger on the side-street patios over one more drink, you bike a bit further along the Rhine bike paths, you embrace the sweatshirt-shorts combo to endure the chilly mornings but prepare for a possibly warmer afternoon and evening.

Yes, swimming in the Adriatic might be great in August, but despite the high possibility of cold, rain, and clouds, I can live with the German summer too.

Deeps thoughts on the Rhine Promenade.

Lisbon, Europe's First International City

Lisbon is a lot of cities. It's Portugal's capital city. It's a food city. A party city. An old city. A medieval city. A modern city.

Most of all, it is Europe's very first truly international city. 

Before New York was New York, before everyone dropped anchor in Amsterdam, before they came to London or Paris or even Rome, Lisbon was where the world came to Europe. 

And because it came aboard Portuguese ships, the flavour this internationality left on the city is unique. The architecture, the food, the city itself all feels like it might be from somewhere else, but has enough of a touch of Portuguese that it does not feel out of place.


A Pile of Tiles

It is forbidden to depict any of Islam's big players. While Europe's artist were painting bearded Jesus pictures, Arab artists were stuck painting lines and shapes. 

Because the Arab's were also the world's medieval mathletes – they invented zero – and because their hot tropical climate was hard on oil paints, they created intricate geometric patterns with tiles. 

The Portuguese picked up this tile making, and being good Christians they ditched the geometric patterns and put Jesus and flowers and God and stuff on the tiles. Then they got more intricate, creating huge pieces of art with dozens or hundreds of bits of tile. 


Today, many of the city's buildings are covered with tiles and they lend the city an Arab look, even though these tiles remain a Portuguese trend, and a specialty.

When the Holy Spirit strikes!

Tile peeping.

Lisbon Feels Like Lisbon

Travel to any big, popular to visit city in Europe and you end up marvelling at how lovely it is. You also find yourself marvelling at how people can live there? Rome was like that. Paris is apparently like this. I always thought the middle of London was a lot like that, unless you were super rich. How do normal people live in a touristic town that, as a result of its touristic-ness, feels blandly touristic?

The core of a city, with its museums, monuments, points of interests, shops, kiosks, restaurants, hotels, hostels, bars, and cafes, is the draw for visiting tourists. As more tourists come, the city's centre becomes less about offering these things for the locals and more about accommodating tourists – or fleecing them, depending on your level of cynicism.

Lisbon's centre is compact, making it great for tourists to like to walk or stroll or amble about from point of interest to restaurant to museum to bar and back to the hotel.

While the 12 squares blocks in the centre of the city's centre has been given over to these hordes of tourists, the actual places you want to visit – Alfama, the city's maze-like Medieval district and the Bairro Alto, the city's nightlife area – are also in the centre, yet still feel like Lisbon, not a watered down touristy Lisbon.

My theory is that Lisbon, as a port city linking Europe with Brazil, India, Africa, and the Far East has been accustomed to having visitors for almost five hundred years. Locals live in these great neighbourhoods, and used to eating and drinking cheek-and-jowl with the herds of visitors. 

They have enough practice with hundreds of years of tourists to not feel like they have to surrender the city centre to them and flee to the suburbs. It adds a welcoming spirit to the city when you're out on the town.

Alfama: A Lisbon hood with its own vibe.

Lacking in Lockers

This cool reception for tourists has its downside. Everywhere we went, it seemed the city was wholly unprepared for the thousands of foreign visitors who flocked to the city.

The major subway stations were choked with tourists lining up to refill their transit cards. A few more machines at these busy stations surely would help the lines move quickly. 

Staying in an Airbnb with a morning checkout time and a late afternoon flight meant our luggage had to go somewhere. We spent over an hour going to various train and subway stations looking for a locker. Each station had a small wall of lockers, all occupied. In some stations, there were tourists zealously guarding an empty locker while a friend made change.

Lisbon is an international city, but in some ways it felt wholly unprepared for its international visitors.


Food

A colleague from Lisbon offered up his tips for the city. I figured it would be advice for beaches and points of interest, with a few bars and restaurants. 

The tip list we got was largely restaurant recommendations, with some pointers on where to find the good places to drink. What made the list so interesting was not its length, but its variety. 

The eateries we visited were not just seafood spots, although the seafood we ate was deliciously fresh. Our choices on list and along the streets included all sorts of cuisines – Indian, Moroccan, Asian, and many more – but many were fused with different cultures and flavours together. And they did it well. After all, cultures and nations have been mixing and fusing in Lisbon for hundreds of years.


Architecture

While the late Gothic architectural craze that was raging across Europe on the 1500s, Portugal conceived its own architectural style. Taking a bit of the Spanish, and combining that with Morrish and Indian influences, Portugal created Manueline architecture.

Sadly, most Manueline buildings were constructed in Lisbon, so many were destroyed in the earthquake and tsunami of 1755 (the Alfama district was spared). There are a few examples still standing like the Jeronimos Monastary, in Belem, just outside of Lisbon.

The church in the Jeronimos Monastary.

No point in talking about architectural influences at the Summer Palace in Sintra – just look.

Unrelated: Going Off the Grid

My data plan was inoperative in Portugal because I have a lousy cellphone provider and a lousy cellphone. Getting shut out from Facebook, Twitter, and most of the news, this year still being 2016, turned out to be a good thing.

Then I returned and learned that some sort of Pokemon Go phenomenon occurred while I was away. I learned about it upon my return, but I still don't understand it.


If you go...

Drink the Green Wine: 
Or Vinho Verde, as the locals call it. It's a bubbly young wine that I ignorantly avoided, thinking it was like champagne, which I am not crazy about it. It's actually dry and only slightly bubbly, like a fröccs – great for afternoon drinking on Portuguese patios.

Buy a transit card: 
Lisbon is a compact city, but you will take a train if you want to hit the beaches or go to Belem, where there are a few nice sites and a cafe where the Pastel di Nata (Portuguese egg tarts – was invented. You'll save a lot of money if you get a transit card and refill it as you go.

Look for random places to eat: 
We stayed in a mixed neighbourhood of locals and tourists. There were many restaurants, but the best were the places with little signage, bright lights, and normal-looking furniture on tile floors. Do not be deterred. Get in there and eat up!

Watching the Euro in Europe

In its simplicity, soccer can be a beautiful, entertaining sport. 

It can also become a tremendously boring sport when you add layers of national leagues and divisions with friendlies and the exhibition games and qualifiers as they do in European professional soccer.

But once every couple of years, the haze of confusion and boredom lifts for a few weeks and I'm able to sit back and enjoy simple, fun soccer again. Sometimes, I even call it football during these lovely tournament times.

It's a bit easier to get emotionally invested in a few national teams, rather than cities with millionaire mercenaries from all over the world. There are no friendlies or exhibition games, every game matters and you can feel the immediacy in the play. They're playing for home, after all.

Yes, the Euro brings the sport of soccerball back its simple beauty, even to this ignorant North American with his hockey and baseball.


More teams, more fun

The tournament widened from 16 teams to 24 teams, so the enthusiasm level across the continent was incredibly high for this year's Euro. 

There are two opposing arguments over this. One side claims this diluted the tournament's talent pool – I heard this from two people, one Portuguese and one German, both accustomed to Euro appearances.

On the other side of the argument, this new format allowed national teams to make their first appearance – either their first ever or their first in a long time – on the international soccer stage. Hungary, Albania, Iceland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all brought a unique energy to the tournament.

Maybe it wasn't pretty for those soccer aficionados, but it definitely made the game more exciting while those teams were playing.



Germany is Europe's America

I was able to get this feel around those teams' enthusiasm largely because I live in Germany. This is one of Europe's new settler countries, where more and more people are from somewhere else.

Italians, Hungarians, Portuguese, French, Turkey – almost every nation represented has a few nationals (except for Iceland, I suppose) living in Germany. They crowd the bars, cheer in the streets, and adorn their German-made cars with their national flags.

When Portugal won on Sunday night, there was shouting and honking and celebrations up and down the busy street near our flat. Being from Toronto, this is standard stuff for an international soccer tournament – especially if you live close to Little Portugal, Little Italy, or Roncesvalles – but it's nice to see in an increasingly multicultural Germany. 


Soccer Mad Portugal 

We were in Lisbon last week and it was difficult not to notice a rise in the usual soccer passion whenever Portugal was scheduled to play that day. 

You would pass a cafe with a TV out front and it's replaying earlier matches from the tournament, usually one that Portugal won. Kids were kicking balls in the street. Adults were kicking balls in the street, while trying not to spill their beer. 

When the semi-final game started, we were just finishing dinner and awaiting the bill. After a longer than usual wait for the dinner's reckoning, we looked around and saw every waiter huddled around the computer screen with rapt attention. I don't think they were studying our bill.

When the final started between Portugal and France, we were in the air returning to Germany. We landed thinking it was over. Almost every male on the plane fumbled for their phone, deactivated flight mode, and rushed to the exit when they realized the game was well into overtime.



Ode to Gabor Kiraly and the Sweatpants

I am also a grey sweat pant aficionado, yet I don't think I have celebrated the Gabor Kiraly enough in this space. 

This is a goalkeeper who wears sweatpants because they are more comfortable than the standard long socks. He kept Hungary in a couple of games, which is clear proof that comfort affects performance. It might be a good reason to start wearing my sweat pantaloons to the office.

Comfortably watching the match.