The castle on the rock is so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never be confounded; the foundation and walls are unpenetrable, the rampiers impregnable, the bulwarks invincible no way but one to it is or can be possible to be made passable. – John Taylor 1618

The final chapter of my European caper comes to it’s conclusion as I mingled amongst the weirdos within the once industrial epicenter of Edinburgh.

Reduce

The number of monuments and statues must be brought under control immediately. It was clear during my many perusals through the downtown core than they were likely reproducing and would soon reach pandemic populations. How is it that regular anybodies with names like Adam Smith, Bobby the Bruce or Billy Wallace can get immortalized? It won’t be long before Edinburgh’s demographics will be overtaken by bronze skinned bastards who want nothing more to stand uncomfortably and gaze at you as if constipated. Someone needs to pull a highlander and give some of these guys a good beheading. There can only be one.

The superficially pretencious restraunteurs that act as despots in their little domains. They seek only those hip and stylish enough to admit into their joints. Yes the dishes they offer might be delicious and reasonably priced, the service might be knowledgeable and flamboyant, but make no mistake, these cretinous villains feast on your acceptance of these facts and use it to fuel their own delusions. I would feel far more comfortable about them if they were replaced with…oh…say..the Swedish Chef.

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Does the place where you live have beautiful rolling green hills a plenty? When speaking comparatively to Edinburgh, only a true sycophant could answer in the affirmative. I can imagine even Elysium being green with envy of the undulating jade mounds that encircle the city and keep it within the warmth of their bosom. Using the fine example set here, the eminent domain and destruction of a few subdivisions followed by the cultivation of seas of grass could do many a North American city well.

The use of bridges throughout the city is unrivaled in their ability to surprise. Often times you’re standing on a bridge and you won’t even know it. Sometimes you’ll think you’re on a bridge when in reality you’ve simply drank too much Glenmorangie. This is the magic of the bridges of Edinburgh.  My ability to convey the way they cut through the urban fabric and create three dimensional spaces through the medium of text is akin to Hawkins explaining hadrons to a kindergarten class.

Another feature of Edinburgh I liked was how they had all kinds of wee places that had names and were somehow historical. I’d be walking inadvertently through a grimy tunnel and I’d notice a sign saying that it was “MacDuff’s Passage” and it would go on to explain how in 1548 some guy used to smuggle donkeys through there, or smoke crack or something. There were all kinds of nooks and crannies like this in the old town.

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Mike Myers had me believing that Scottish people all talked like the dad in So I Married An Axe Murderer. Much to my chagrin that was not the case.

Lack at tha size of thaht boys heid. Ahm not keiddin it’s leik ahn orrange on ah touthpaick. Shhhh you’re gonna give the boy a complex. Well thats ah hüge nohggin! It’s ah verchüel plahnetoid. It has its oüwn wetha system! Heid moüve!

I believe it should be made an imperative and unalienable objective of the Scottish Parliament to ensure by an act of legislature that everyone talks like this, if only for the benefit of those who think that’s how they really talk. (IE. Me)

Incinerate

My first suggestion was to incinerate the weather, but I think the Edinburghers might run into some trouble with that task, so I’ll fall back to two things everyone can agree on. Incinerate might be too soft a term for these two structures, so obliterate might be more apropos. The National Museum of Scotland is a bland Corbusian beast that would be better suited for the test site of Operation Castle. Even Prince Charles pulled out of the project once he found out what it was going to look like, and look at his taste, he married that zombie Camilla for godsakes.

The other building that’s gotta go, is the Hotel Missoni at the corner of George IV Bridge and the Royal Mile. The cardboard box look-alike is totally out of context. They could have at least come up with a Scottish name for it to save some scorn. That’s globalization for you. I’ve read some architectural articles about it, and it amazes me how people are deluding themselves in its defence. I realize that putting up a new building in a UNESCO world heritage site is no trivial matter, but how hard is it to build something with the fine details and textures of the older buildings while adding a few modern features? Instead we get a bland rectangular prism, that might be passable in some suburban office park, but looks like a soggy box of Shreddies compared to its neighbors. Anyone know how to bait an asteroid? We can make it look like an accident...I promise.

After Edinburgh, my wonderful two week city skip through Europe came to its end, and hence this series with it. Which is just as well really, as now I can focus on getting ready to scam my way back into the Far East with haste.

Andorra exists in an odd stratum of countries called microstates. These nations have avoided getting absorbed by larger states throughout history by arming themselves with extravagant casinos and various tourist traps. Invading armies would fall into a vicious cycle of gambling degeneracy and taking their kids to petting zoos, only to fall to the point where they were forced to take up jobs cleaning llama shit to pay off their gambling debts. Not only do these places still exist, they stick it to the larger states by having liberal tax regimes and foiling geography majors. One of my travel goals is to eventually hit up all of the European microstates, so this time around I was satisfied to eliminate the little principality snuggled between France and Spain’s ass chaps.

Reduce

Not really much to reduce here seeing as the entire country has a mere 84,000 people and an area of 468 sq. kilometers.

Reuse

Andorra is downhill mountain biking mecca. Sure there’s only two main resorts (Vallnord and Grandvalira) but that’s like a chocolate chip cookie bitching about having only sweet chocolatey chips nestled inside its warm freshly baked dough. For any serious mountain biker, riding here is a rite of passage. If you ask me, more ski resorts should utilise their lifts during the summer, and more bikers should use those lifts. They’re definitely on the ball with this in Andorra.

I could definitely get used to the 0% tax rate. What do taxes pay for anyway? Andorra has everything I need or want without the government sticking it’s grubby meat hooks into my dusty pockets.

It would be nice to see the whole global system of nation states revert to the city-states of centuries past. It would give you much more options if you’re fed up with the ideological or political regime, you could just hop in your motorized carriage and be on your way to a whole new country in less than an hour. In this day and age that I can have 400 different kinds of toothpaste, why can’t I have 400 different countries per continent to choose from as well?

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Thanks in part to its tax haven status; the Andorra de la Villa’s downtown is essentially a giant duty free shop. It would be good times if they diversified past the perfume, liquor, and nameless electronics stores and added on an extra dimension with fine establishments such as cape boutiques, African long horned beetle emporiums and banjo dispensaries.

Incinerate

Your nuts. If you bail at Vallnord’s Project 1.0.

Reduce

Ildefons Cerdà, the fucking guy who designed the city had a fetish for octagons. You can tell because every intersection in the district he planned is shaped in one. Pedestrians aren’t able to cross directly with the traffic, you need to walk around to where the crosswalks are then walk back around again to get where you were going. I wish this guy were still alive so I could watch him get pummeled inside The Octagon. Then maybe the city could pummel some of those eight sided leg beaters into squares.

The Spaniards should become reducers by reducing the reduction in open businesses during August. Yeah I said it. Everything is closed because everyone’s on holidays. Made me reminisce about Golden Weeks and Lunar New Years of yore. Yet the seething masses of idled migrant workers were replaced with slack jawed Spanish yokels, much to my chagrin.

It would be nice if the prices of things were lower. I know Europe as a whole is expensive especially considering the current dollar/euro exchange rate, but for some reason Spain doesn’t exactly feel as advanced as the rest of Europe. Felt like I was paying more for less. For example internet in our hotel was 20 euros per day. When they told me that I told em to get out of here (or there, wherever it was), I would go to Starbucks instead. I still got shafted cause no Starbucks in Barcelona have wireless. Most people didn’t even know what the hell I was talking about, they must of thought I was talking some Terminator Skynet shit or something.

Pharmacies at every god damned corner. Spaniards must really like their drugs, perhaps they use them to sleep through the oppressive heat.

Germans who think that hotel towels give them whole day ownership of deck chairs and lay flats could some re-education. I met a Manx guy in London who actually warned me about this behavior but I thought he was full of shit. Turns out the Germans were. They think they can go out in the morning, toss the odd towel from the room on the deck chair like a dog pissing on a pole, then come back at sunset or whenever is the best time to be there. It’s called USE IT OR LOSE IT bitches!

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Tapas and mini tapas, the one restaurant food that was priced right in contrast with every other country that serves it. Does anyone else find it to be the European version of sushi? All I could think of when I was eating it was maki and tempura rolls for some reason. Whoever brings mini-tapas to North America is going to make a mint.

In most places, restaurants shut down around 10pm. In Barcelona, things didn’t hit full swing until around then. I’d like to see more of this elsewhere. Sure you can get late night food at the usual greasy spoon suspects or Chinese food joints, but it sure would be nice if we had more quality options open late into the night.

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Ok I don’t know where else to put this, but I feel it is necessary to mention. I guess it’s because of the heat, as anyone who’s been to Spain can attest, but I noticed that many Spanish women neglect to wear bras. I think it’s important to mention, to prevent being knocked out by stray knockers, or being blinded by the high beams so to say. In some instances it can be quite distracting, in others it’s like watching a 50’s scientific educational video where they explore the limits of human skin elasticity.

Incinerate

People aren’t going to want to add me as a friend on myspace after I say this but it must be said…Gaudi’s architecture is execrable. Maybe if it was worse than it is, and took on insane forms and impossible structures it might have been able to work the so bad it’s good angle. It’s actually a quite boring. They say he was one of the most original architects, to which I call shenanigans. My four year old imaginary dog can make random organic shapes as well. With his poop. Just cause he can, doesn’t mean he qualifies as some mind bending genius starchitect. Take a look around the world, where else can we see the Gaudi style? Even China, the mad lover of ball bustingly bad architecture hasn’t xerox’d it like they do to pretty much everything. Don’t get me started on that cathedral. Nobody likes an erection that doesn’t stop.

A mere two and a half hours on a fast train from Amsterdam will get you to the fine city of Antwerp. The city is neither overrun with ants, nor were twerps a problem I encountered. I would have liked to have been here longer, but only had the day, so my experience here is best described not so much a common experience, but more the ravings of a madman after one too many Belgian beers.

Reduce

For a country that has some of the best restaurants and food in the world, there were a suspiciously high number of McDonald’s. Not quite sure what is going on here, but I guess Belgians need their corporate grease intake like everyone else. I’ll admit I had a minute urge to see if their Big Macs were made with Brie and organic beef, but alas my only time under the yellow arches was spent relieving myself.

I’m sure it was just me, but it seemed like there was an awful number of people smoking in Antwerp. And it wasn’t just cigarettes. Cubans, pipes, cigarillos, R.J. Reynolds would be a proud man. Now living in Asia (or pretty much anywhere other than Canada), you come to realize smokers make up a good sized chunk of the populace. When it’s only cigarettes that are being smoked, your nose gets used to the smell and you learn to block it out unless someone’s getting their shit all up in your face. When it’s all these different kinds of tobacco however, your nose is dealing with a full scale assault. How the slut am I supposed to savor my Belgian truffles if Jacques LeBleu is stickin his stogie up my snout?

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They had best selection of high quality beers in the world. Waffles baked up like it’s nobodies’ business. Seriously, I tried to commandeer the waffle shop and turn it into my own but was nearly beaten half to death with a wooden spatula. Chocolate, gourmet foods, more mayo and fries, beer gardens galore, great balance of modern and medieval architecture, I could go on forever, but I’ll be honest, it’s more fun for me to write about the things I don’t like.

I also gotta give a shout out to the Antwerpen-Centraal Train Station, the most architecturally amazing station I’ve ever been in. Some parts of it look like it was designed by Dracula, and some parts of it by MC Escher.

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The city shuts down completely around 5:30pm. I wish it could stuff could stay open later, so you could, you know, buy stuff when you get off work. My only hypothesis for this is…

Incinerate

…that some of the fiercest eurotrash dick puppets I’ve seen start cruising around the city in their lowered and banged up 3 series beamers, terrorizing the city like Vikings with horribly loud dance music right around this time. It’s no wonder everyone heads for the hills. Lets get Temple of Doom on their asses! Tear out some hearts, put em in a cage and lower them into a pit of molten lava….that’ll sort em out.

Your daily dose of gothic:

Below, the train station that’ll blow your mind:

When I was little… my father was famous. He was the greatest samurai in the empire; and he was the Shogun’s decapitator. He cut off the heads of a hundred and thirty-one lords…no wait…wrong intro. Let me try that again. When I was little I had this borderline unhealthy obsession with carnivorous plants. I was totally captivated by the evolutionary processes that had developed once sedate and passive members of the plant kingdom into ruthless killing machines. Not only would they capture and kill without mercy, but they could also digest their prey, using the nutrients from their victims’ corpses to grow stronger and more capable. While in Amsterdam visiting the Hortus was a must see destination for me, cause I knew they had a decent selection of plants there. Plants that enjoyed eating meat. Here is just about every type of plant they have there in glorious colour and 3D*

*not actually in 3D

Below, two fine examples of the Nepenthes alata or Winged Nepenthes. These bad boys operate in the jungle predator style. Bugs are attracted to the sweet scent of the goop inside that urn shaped apparatus and go in for a drink, or maybe a greedy swim. What the poor bastards don’t realize is that the walls of the inside of the urn are slippery and the pool of goo limits their movement. Even if they do manage to make it up, there’s a set of inward curving teeth that keep in their place. They eventually drown to death, and are absorbed like a body in a bathtub full of lye.

The Pinguicula caudata is a temptress, looking all cute and innocent like it would be the perfect plant to have in your window sill so you could talk to it everyday like a complete nutter. As a matter of fact, it would make a perfect plant to have in your window sill, if you want to DESTROY all forms of insect life that exist there. The leaves of this plant are equipped with two types of glands. One of those types attracts the bugs with a sexy perfume. Once the bugs fly down and try to do the leave with their tiny insect wangs, the other type of gland attacks viciously by digesting the bug! The insect gets stuck because the leaf is essentially fly paper, and it also curves and wraps a little bit around the bug to make sure more glands can get in on the digesting action.

Unless you’re sickly fascinated with carnivorous plants like me, then I’m sure you didn’t know about the existence of the Drosera genus of plants, several of which are below. These vicious beasts wait for prey to land on their leaves that are covered in red tentacles that SUCK THE GUTS right out of the insect. The leaves themselves also bend and curl up so that the maximum number tentacles can get their share of juicy insect innards. Efficiency + tentacles = big in Japan.

Much like the Nepenthes you saw above, our friends from the genus Sarracenia employ urns or pitchers to trap and annihilate their foes. The nice thing about these guys is that if you’re interested in seeing them in real life, instead of on your glowing computer screen like the pathetic nerd you are, all you have to do is tread out into your nearest bog or swamp (if you live in North America.) Then you can witness the glory of a plant vs. insect death match and make bets with Mother Nature on the outcome. (Hint: the plants win)

Moving on, we have an unidentifiable member of the genus Utricularia, also known as Bladderworts. Don’t let that wanky British sounding name fool you. These fiendish foes employ a set of subterranean traps to catch their prey. The traps look like bulbs with a small door on the front. Tiny bugs decide to pay a visit…and PAY WITH THEIR LIVES! After entering, the door quickly shuts behind them, and they’re stuck wondering if they left the stove on at home. Then after waiting around for a bit, they commit insecticide out of boredom, and the bladderwort digests them like a Big Mac, except tiny sized, so more like a Mini Mac or a Nano Mac, or even a Pico Mac. You get the idea.

Even though I was once a genius when it came to these plants, much has changed in the world since then, and many new flesh eating flora have since been discovered. I’m not quite sure what is in the picture below, but I’ve got to warn you, it’s probably the most devious of the bunch. If you ask me, I’d say it probably attracts insects by shape shifting into myself. Bugs love me. Once they’re fooled into thinking they can steal my precious blood as they often do, the plant quickly pulls a flamethrower out of its back pocket and BLAM! This guy knows how to represent.

The last CP that came out today is the people’s champion, Dionaea muscipula, better known to you plebeians as the Venus Flytrap. You’re probably already quite familiar with this one, so instead I’ll tell you about another. In freshwaters throughout the world is a species known as Aldrovanda vesiculosa. The traps work just like on the Venus Flytrap, springing shut at any sign of movement within the jaws of the bear trap. It lives in the water though, so it feeds mostly on aquatic life such as mermaids and nemo.

As a closer, it’s not a carnivorous plant but something called a bat orchid. Even though it doesn’t consume things, I’m sure that in your nightmares it will.

Amsterdam was my second stop on this prolific pan European tour. It is one of the most pedestrian friendly cities I’ve been to, being perfectly flat, loaded with human scale urban design, and plenty of easy ways to get around. Sometime in the past the potheads who were tired of getting lost in the forest and the bush found out about it, and they migrated here in droves. This made it not just the Netherland’s capital but also dope culture’s capital. Even though it’s the capital, it isn’t the seat of the government. They probably had to move all the important administrative organs to The Hague because everyone was getting high and sitting around playing bongo drums in Vondelpark.

Reduce

If you were blind and had to judge a place by nothing but what you could eat, you would most likely head back to the airport immediately after arriving in downtown Amsterdam thinking you had mistakenly landed in Istanbul. There appears to be more doner kebab shops than all other sources of food combined. While I’ll admit I enjoyed a doner pizza or two, it would have been nice to find more Dutch restaurants other than the ones that were obviously catering to tourists with jacked prices and junk taste. If I was the merciless dictator of Amsterdam, I would order some of these doner places to be turned into convenience stores, which are conspicuously lacking considering the need for 24 hour munchie depots.

The number of weirdo Dutchies should be restricted by an official cull. While my interaction with real live Dutch people was limited because somehow I kept winding up in doner shops, here are two lovely encounters I had:

Encounter 1) while going through airport security on the way out some old guy starts bitching at me in Dutch. I ignore him, and then he says rudely in English “don’t you speak the Dutch?” I of course replied in the negative. He then asks, “Well what are you doing in Holland?” to which my travel buddy quickly replied, “leaving!” as we neared the metal detector. He had no comeback.

Encounter 2) the hostel we were staying in had a series of doors to get past in order to get to your room. First was one you used your key card to unlock, which lead into a holding room where you had to buzz to get entrance from the front desk, then another separate secure door to get into your specific building and of course then your door room. All that security, plus checking IDs and filling out forms when checking in, and still the geniuses at the hostel allowed some Dutch guy with zero bags to check into our dorm who then of course ransacked the place, even smashed open one of the lockers. Fortunately for me the beer I had bought earlier was not pilfered.

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Amsterdam has the best bicycle transportation infrastructure in the world. Under normal Canadian circumstances I loathe bike lanes, because they lead drivers to think that bikes belong only in those narrow poorly designed paths of doom that are often blocked with parked cars and booby trapped with the infamous door prize. Not so in Amsterdam. The bike is definitely at the top of the transport totem pole, and is the best way to get around.

I’ll turn to this famous scene for one of my favorite things about Holland:

“Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in a movie theatre. And I don’t mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald’s. Also, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?”
“They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?”
“No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.”
”What’d they call it?”
“Royale with Cheese.”
“What’d they call a Big Mac?”
“Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.”
“What do they call a Whopper?”
“I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King. But you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?”
“What?”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Goddamn!”
“I seen ‘em do it. And I don’t mean a little bit on the side of the plate, they fuckin’ drown ‘em in it.”

Goddamn right! And it was hella good mayonnaise too.

Recycle

While the biking infrastructure is very good, the bikes are NOT. Most of the bikes in Amsterdam are heavy old style single speed cruisers with shit comfort and shittier braking. Riding around on them was like mowing the lawn with your teeth… if you were 85 years old!

Incinerate

The hippy population is out of control. Sadly they don’t make like lemmings and jump into the Keizersgracht. Vondelpark is overrun with them, as are other locations throughout the city that have 24 hour snack facilities and hallucinatory visual décor. I originally thought they could be reduced to a controlled number, but I’ve since realized that the best way to solve the problem is if they all went up in smoke.

Now instead of posting a bunch of photos of boring old buildings that every city in Europe has, here’s some crazy looking modern ones of which Holland has plenty.

When I’m not cruising around in my flatulence powered Prius, or sipping my organic green tea while chained to fin whale, I’m usually thinking about how I can save the planet. Since I’m traveling through Europe, I’m going on a mission to save the environment here from the hazardous waste we know as eurotrash. It tends to proliferate itself in this part of the world. My modus operandi for dealing with it is to use the three R’s to clean up the waste.

The three R’s are of course: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Reduce is for things that need to be minimized as much as possible, like Napoleon. Can you imagine how much of a pain in the ass he would have been if he was 6’5”? Re-use is for the stuff that is mind blowingly awesome already, like autobahns and triple beers. These should be copied and implemented across North America and Asia as quickly as possible. Recycling is for the things are good, but could use an improvement, for example a lot of the girls here are smoking hot, but body hair is to them as white is to rice. Finally there is a process that isn’t part of the 3R’s but had to be included. This is necessary because some shit has no hope for absolution and the only way to deal with it is to burn it with fire, hence incineration that coincidentally I hear the Europeans have perfected.

I will apply each of these environmental processes to the places I visit while I’m here, so that when the UN sees this, they can work their magic to solve the problem just like they always do. On to my first destination: London.

Reduce

Air pollution, maybe it’s in the streets, maybe it’s in the tube, all I know is every night I could power a small coal station with the stuff I mined from my nose. I don’t think the air underground there has changed since the industrial revolution. Its presence made me quite nostalgic for China’s dust storm season.

The number of people/tourists is at a critical mass. I was expecting the friction and compression of the people at Trafalgar Square to explode at any given moment but as usual my atomic aspirations were let down. For some reason all the busiest places are all crammed into one area instead of being separated by trenches and barbed wire.

Reuse

Despite my already mentioned qualms with the tube, getting around on it is for the most part simple, especially with the electronic card system. It takes you everywhere you want to go, and probably even more places you don’t.

London definitely has more attractive women than I’ve seen in almost any other city anywhere. However they were all in the 18-25 category. It’s a mystery as to what happened to the older ones, although I’m sure any guy who’s married can probably illuminate us.

Recycle

Inconsistent tipping is rife in London. Some places you’re a muppet if you tip, other places you are if you don’t. The root of the problem is probably the root of most problems in this world, the American tourists who feel it necessary to spread their absurd 20% plague to everyone else. Like feeding ducks in the winter, establishments that are used to this practice become hostile when you fail to leave a tip. How about ensuring that service sector employees are making respectable wages, and then having a communication campaign to educate people that tipping is unnecessary and punishable by forced listening to Bjork on repeat. That should solve the problem.

The pubs are a fantastic place for a drink, unless what you’re drinking isn’t beer. At almost every restaurant the opposite holds true: competent bar staff and a good selection of booze, but only Stella, Heineken and some weird Italian piss at almost every place. Why isn’t it possible it get good beer in a restaurant? Or a bad ass Bond style martini in a pub? Hopefully these two types of establishment can have a lovechild that excels at both forms of refreshment.

London is to the heat as Shanghai is to the cold. I guess they just thought the summer never gets hot enough to warrant proper cooling. Well they thought like fucking retards because it certainly does warrant it and more, never have I longed more for Canada’s frigid arctic winters than those excruciating 30 minute segments I spent as a fried sardine on the tube.

Incinerate

Pre-packaged foods. I’m looking at your prêt a manger. I know the food in England isn’t the most well regarded, but at the very least they could have more places that serve up fresh food as opposed to shrink wrapped shit with a “dispose after” date printed on it.

Burqas are fucking ridiculous, but I’m sure they would burn quite easily, I wish we could somehow bbq the dresses and those that forced the people wearing them in one giant fundamentalist cookoff.