I'm Going to Europe the Right Way

Klaus Zynski Invades Europe, Part 1. Plus, A Brief Review of Scandinavian Air.

Been too long since I’ve gone abroad. 2019, in the summer, was the last time. A month in Scotland. Liked the Scots, liked the touring, liked writing about the experience. Travel writing feels like it ought to be done by hand. Scribbling into my yellow legal pad feels better for the Soul than doing this in the Notes App. I feel I’m doing this The Right Way in many senses, this is just one of them.

First: the bare facts, the vital signs. Your author. White male, six feet and one half inches¹, Blond. Blue-eyed. New Jersey-born, Pennsylvania-raised. Now residing in Washington DC, about which more will be said. For now suffice it to say that the city is wounded, gut-shot, leaking stomach acid and poisoning its blood stream with its accumulated feces. But in saying this we have left the intended playing-surface of facts. Let us return.

My traveling companion. Chinese-American. Female. Five feet, one inch tall² in defiance of even the most optimistic height projections from her pediatricians. My fiancee. Possessing a supply of practicality and sensibility inversely proportional to the author’s (slim to none). You will know her as Liz.

Red-eye flight. Another right thing to do, sleep on the plane (with chemical assistance as necessary) and hit the ground running as best you can. Airline, Scandinavian Air. Departing from Dulles. DC has 3 airports and I don’t think any of them can be considered a consensus number one. Dulles’ location is inconvenient compared to Reagan but at least you can reach it via Metro, unlike BWI. I do find something charming about Dulles, at least on the way out. The grand old modernist concrete facade of the check-in terminal feels like Cary Grant should be chasing someone through it. It’s going back into Dulles that gets you, those infernal people movers drive men to murder. That’s a problem for future Klaus, and fifteen busy days separate me from that asshole.

Itinerary - Berlin, Dresden, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, maybe Brno. Six hour layover in Copenhagen on the way out. The meat of it is Berlin, Vienna, Prague. There’s two basic approaches to the European holiday, either you set up shop in a city and take day trips here and there but mostly stay within that one city, get to know it. The alternative is the grand tour, fit as much in, as many cities, as much art, culture, history, food, revelry, shopping, as much stuff as you can stand. Maybe more than you can stand. It’s been six years since I went, it may be six more before I go again. I’d done the home base strategy twice before, in Edinburgh and in Madrid. I felt I had to go a bridge too far. Suck the marrow from the trip. Liz agreed. Either approach would be right, but the novelty of our hectic itinerary makes it feel all the more right.

I can add more detail in post³. I’d like to reach a stopping point before the melatonin takes hold.

A long vacation ought to be deployed for maximum effect. We all need a three-day weekend away sometimes but two and a half weeks is, I think justifiably, an every-few-years affair. Maximum tension in the everyday should be resolved by maximum relaxation. The tension is certainly reaching a local maximum. Not within myself, maybe within Liz, who works a more stressful job than I. Certainly within my city.

The energy in DC is oppressive to the extreme. Lethal, on the verge of frenzy, to paraphrase Bateman. Untold hundreds contemplate the deaths of dreams , lifestyles, careers, friendships, while a new-old commentariat drunk on rhetorical success and twenty-five dollar downtown martinis declares sympathy passe.

In the face of such circumstances, “out” is a logical place to get to.

Scandinavian Air, In Brief

I was right, I think, in trusting the Danes to run an airline, sight unseen. Would seem an appropriate marriage of business model and national temperament. Helps as well, and I’ll double check, that this is almost certainly a state-run enterprise⁴. Given that for-profit airlines seem to take it in turns to either file for bankruptcy or gobble each other up to prevent bankruptcy it would seem that these things may be best as loss-leaders.

Cabin clean, service professional, food alright. Had a Carlsberg (complimentary) and watched a documentary about volcanoes⁵ while the melatonin kicked in. Slept maybe five hours thereafter with minimal interruption.

In my first moment of minor culture shock I was seated next to a Danish woman for the flight. Perfectly polite and cordial, spoke good English (the smug, overachieving bastards). In retrospect I dunno why this surprised me. Fly a Danish airline and get Danes. In general they are as advertised. Tall, white, fair-haired. The flight crew seemed to do some tanning, giving them a pink-orange complexion. More surprises to come, I’m sure. Copenhagen in an hour. Berlin in a few more hours.

1. The worst height. Either I look like I’m lying about my height or I make other guys look like they’re lying about theirs.

2.

Liz

demanded that I fix this. That one inch is of great meaning to her.

3. I did, full disclosure.

4. I checked, I was maybe half right if I’m being kind to myself. 32% owned by the Danish finance ministry.

5. Fire of Love (2022)