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.

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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)

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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…

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…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.