Beer

I like beer. I know what you're gonna say, "A lot of men like beer, Martin!", but with me, it's a whole lot deeper. I don't mean that I spend my days sitting on the couch, watching sports, and guzzling six-packs of cheap swill for the sole purpose of making the game interesting and catching a 'buzz'. I don't like just any beer. I am in an eternal search for excellent beer, for what I feel is the best of the best, beer that has reached a pinnacle of superiority. I only drink infrequently and in moderation, and I hate to waste calories and money on inferior product. I don't drink to get drunk, but to savor and appreciate the subtleties and complexities of a well-brewed brewski, the depths and character, the texture and color. Yes, I am a beer snob.

Now, before moving to Europe, I was really looking forward to testing and tasting all the varieties of beer that they brew here. After all, beer has been brewed in Europe for centuries, millennia, they have to know what they're doing by now! Sadly, most of them don't. I have yet to find a beer that comes even close to the quality and sublime tastes of many well-brewed American beers(and please, don't think that I am speaking of Budweiser or Coors or any other mass-brewed American piss, when I refer to American beer). I can only believe that, as with many, many other aspects of European culture, they continue to do things the same way they have done them for centuries simply for the fact that 'this is the way they have done them for centuries'! Cultural inertia is a condition to be feared and loathed.

So, no luck on the beer front for me. I thought that Scotland or England might have some decent brews, but no luck there either. Guinness(I know, it's Irish)is pathetic, the taste is average, but with no depth. It's hollow. I tried at least half a dozen UK beers, and on a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the best about a 3. Swiss beer is awful, possibly even worse than "Badweiser", which I had previously thought was the worst beer ever created, and the Swiss drink it as if they actually liked it. The main brand here in Lucerne is called Eichhoff, and I cough (get it?) if I ever have to drink it! Unfortunately, they seem to have a virtual monopoly on the dispensing of beer in this canton. You can't go anywhere around here without being overwhelmed with Eichhoff advertisements and Eichhoff-sponsored restaurants and bars. It's as if, even with a monopoly, they still have to inundate the population with advertising to get them to drink their slop. I pity the Swiss.


I will continue to search for a decent beer in Europe as long as I live here, but with less and less expectation for something truly sensational. I have yet to travel around Germany and sample what they have to offer, and they are really my last hope. Or maybe Belgium?

Back from the land of my ancestors!

I have returned from communing with the Isle of the Mighty, the mythic home of my barbarian forebears. I return refreshed, reinvigorated, and remade, a man that has delved into the spirituality of the land that gave birth to his family's lineage, and come back renewed, inspired with a new knowledge of my past! ..................... Actually, I didn't really do any of that, but I did visit a town that bore the name of my mother's side of the family. It had a population of about 38. I notified the local authorities that their lord had returned and that I would like to be directed to my castle so that I could begin my lordly duties, but they seemed unimpressed and woefully uninformed of my majesty. I chastised them soundly for their ignorance, and threatened to have them drawn and quartered, but still no dice. They simply don't make peasants the way they used to.

We did make it back from Scotland and England with only hours to spare from a potential catastrophe. If we had booked a flight back the next morning, we might still be there. We got back on the night of Wednesday the 14th, and on Thursday the 15th they closed all the airports because of ash from the volcano in Iceland. What timing! It was a perfectly-timed return from an awesome vacation.

Timi and I both liked Scotland even more than we thought we would, and the overall smoothness of the trip really added to our enjoyment. Normally, at least with us, any substantial vacation like this that includes travel on planes, trains, automobiles, and buses, as well as multiple hotels, usually involves a few 'kinks'. That is, unforeseen problems arise that have to be dealt with, such as reservation mistakes or misunderstandings, miscalculations with time and distance estimations, delays, and so on. Being the seasoned travelers that we are, we know all the situations that can come up, and we are as prepared as possible for them, even anticipating them. Not this time; everything went as smoothly as a baby's butt. We really had a great time. Scotland was awe-inspiringly beautiful, we saw tons of castles, and Lochs, and medieval towns, and awesome scenery, and picturesque countryside. Hard to imagine that it could have gone better.


We ran into a few surprising discoveries as well, and isn't that part of what traveling is all about? For one, Scotland has very few freeways. At most, you could call them highways, and even these waver back and forth from an actual highway to a country road to a one lane track through farmland. Far out, man. I had figured that there would be full blown freeways connecting all the major population centers, but I was sorely mistaken. There aren't too many 'population centers' in Scotland anyway. Basically just Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Inverness. Everything else is at most just a big town, and at the least just a small collection of old stone and brick houses, an ancient church, perhaps a tiny grocery store, and lots of sheep. Some of them don't look like they've changed much in 800 years! Even the highways aren't really highways by American standards or definitions. For some reason that I was unable to discern, the British build their roads extremely narrowly, often with little or no shoulder, and often with a low rock wall running immediately along the side of said road. Then they have a bunch of huge trucks and farm vehicles drive along these roads, usually right down the center because they are too big to stay in the abnormally small lanes created for them, so as to scare the Bejesus out of all the tourists blithely driving their subcompacts in the other direction, and with nowhere to go because of the aforementioned brick walls blocking their escape route!! Add to this 'stew of fear' thousands of potholes of all sizes and shapes conveniently placed so as to maximize the tension and potential damage to your rental vehicle, having to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road, the GPS system telling you that you are exceeding the speed limit, your wife pointing out all the beautiful scenery you are missing as you're fingers are glued to the steering wheel in a grip of death, and you're eyes are glued to the eighteen wheeler bearing down on you and the apparent 2 millimeters of space between the rock wall on your right, your car, and the truck, which is being driven by a mangle-toothed English bumpkin hopped-up on amphetamines. Fun, fun, fun.

We planned on checking out as many castles as we could, and we certainly checked out a lot. My personal favorites are the ruins; they allow you to use your imagination so much more, they're more romantic, they often have more interesting histories, and you can usually take some really cool pictures. We were pleasantly surprised with Inverness, a beautiful little city in the north with the river Ness running through it, and Loch Ness just to the south. Loch Ness itself was very cool, very mysterious and foreboding. We took a cruise on it to Urquhart castle, a ruin right on the shore of the lake, but we never saw the infamous monster. What a Bummer.

We'd been to Edinburgh before, so knew a little of what to expect, and we weren't disappointed. It is an awesome city, so Medieval, so grand, with such a fascinating history. Took a tour of the underground, particularly Mary King's close, and really enjoyed it, checked out the castle, the Royal Mile, Hollyrood Palace, the Prince's Park, all the memorials and viewpoints, and on and on. Glasgow was a bit of a disappointment, just a bunch of shopping malls and stores, but there were some pretty cool old buildings. We stopped off in Nottingham in England on the way back, and I liked it, even though it had a sizable ghetto surrounding the downtown core. I hear it's nickname is "Shottingham" , from the amount of crime that goes down there. Went to the castle where the Sheriff of Nottingham once lived that was built on a sandstone bluff riddled with caves and old tunnels, got our pictures in front of the Robin Hood statue, saw the reputedly oldest pub in all of England, and checked out several old Catholic cathedrals that had been converted to pubs and cafes! With 95% of the English being completely non-religious, there isn't much use for a lot of the old churches. Instead of letting all of these beautiful, incredibly-designed old buildings just rot and fall down from lack of use and money, they convert them into something useful. Sounds good to me, and a much better use than what they were originally meant for, which was keeping the ignorant, ignorant.

I'm sure there are many of you out there, like myself, that when hearing a proper English accent, you immediately imbue the speaker with higher than average intelligence; that just by the fact that they speak so 'elucuant-lak'(intentional misspelling), compared to American English, they must be smarter than us. I am here to dispel that misconception. English people are just as dumb on average, and very possibly even dumber, than Americans. That is a very strong statement coming from me, seeing as I have a very low opinion of the average American's intelligence. The accent is just a ruse, to make us think that they are smart. In reality, they're about as sharp as a bowl full of jello. Add to this revelation the fact that they're moving up on Americans fast in the fatso department, and it leaves only one word to describe the common English person: Bovine. Sorry, but I had to say it. We loved the UK, but it really is full of dumb fatties. What does that say about us? Now, I have known, and worked with, my fair share of British people, and I have very often found them to be very smart, and very witty; I always admired their quick wit and sharp sense of humor. I can only assume that the English that I have been in contact with in the past were those who found it in their best interests to leave England and only come back for visits, that they were obviously the cream of the crop, and had to leave their homeland in order to realize greater goals than they could in the land of their birth. Another possibility is that all the smart, good looking English people live in the major cities, which we bypassed on this trip. Damn, I love writing this Blog sometimes, cause I can be as brutal as I want to be!

Moving onward. I have to ask, What's with the makeup overload? I'd never seen so many women, and girls, that appeared to have applied their makeup with a trowel. I think that it actually made their heads several sizes larger, leading me to believe that if I just took a hammer and chisel to it I would find a teeny tiny real head underneath it all! What are they thinking!!?? Now, let's add poofy, teased-out hair to the description, 40 pounds of excess 'baggage', and a snaggle-toothed mouth that has never seen the inside of a dentist's office, and what do we have? A sight for sore eyes, or should I say a sight that makes your eyes sore.

There is definitely a lot of unhealthy food and dining options available in America, but I think over the last 10 years or so we have come a long way in creating and growing a lot of healthy alternatives. We have Whole Foods market, Wild Oats, health food and supplement markets all over the place, organic options are expanding every day, even at Wal-Mart now!, most restaurants have many healthy possibilities to choose from on their menus, and on and on. This is not so in the UK. Their restaurants and fast food establishments are full of nothing but fat, breaded, and fried options. Fish and chips, meat pies with mashed potatoes, bangers and mash, hamburgers and chips, bacon-wrapped this and bacon-wrapped that. The same with their grocery stores, nothing but high-density carbs and fat as far as the eye can see. I have no difficulty imagining what it is that keeps the British so fat and out of shape. The food was very tasty and filling, but I felt like I needed angioplasty when I got back home, and Timi was physically sick from the amount of fat and grease she'd had to eat.

Regardless of my perhaps unfair observations, we really did have a great time, and all in all we had no problems with the British people, especially the Scottish. I just can't help criticising everything, it's my nature, and I can't help analyzing everything and making comparisons, it's what I am. It's a sickness, I know, but what can I do? I may come back and polish up and add to this Blog in the future, but I really want to post something now, because it has been a long time since I have posted anything. Hope you didn't hate it, and if you have any questions, comments, or criticisms, let me know. Next Blog will be back to the wild and crazy land of Switzerland. See ya!