Whenever two people get into a discussion over which beer is good and which isn't, I always roll my eyes at them. And you would think that by now I would stop, because it happens so often. It's a case of "what am I not getting here?". I have those quite often, whenever there is a heavily contested subject or people spend a lot of time and energy on something that seems fairly pointless, I want to be a little humble and approach the subject with some humility. So instead of saying "that's a total waste of time", I try to understand what's so special about it. Well, without fail, after taking an interest in the subject, I conclude that it *is* a total waste of time. It seems that when I don't "get it" from a distance, no amount of scrutiny will change that, and while I waste my time on it, at least I can say that I didn't dismiss these people's great passion without trying to grasp it.

But back to beer again. People arguing over which beer is the best is one thing, a point in time where I can say with complete conviction that "this topic is not for me". But when they ask my opinion about beer, that's when I get dragged into it. "How do you like the beer?" "Well, it's beer.." Yup, that's my answer. I just don't see the big difference. Heineken is more bitter, Amstel is a bit sweeter. I've had about two of each since I've been in Utrecht. But it's not like there's a big difference. One beer that does stand out is Corona, very light color and very delicate taste. That's one I could probably pick out of a line-up. The rest is mostly various brands with subtle differences. Or maybe I just don't drink enough beer to appreciate what sets them apart. I've been drinking tea all my life and I could tell you which brand of tea has what taste and how they differ. I'm not religious about it, though, unlike beer fans.

But more than distinguishing between brands it is about classifying beer into "good" and "bad". You will hear statements like "in the Czech Rep they have great beer". So apparently any brand over there is great. I've no idea what makes beer good or bad, either way a summer cyclist [or a fruit smoothie] wipes the floor with it.

Have you seen those people always drinking coffee, on the train, on the subway, in the computer lab, at lectures, in the cafeteria, on the street, in coffee shops, at home, everywhere? I have become one of those people. Well, not exactly, because my consumer instincts do not quite match with the culture of buying food and drink everywhere, I think more along the lines of "if I get it at the supermarket, it'll be cheaper". But that's really all that's holding me back from drinking coffee all the time. At school the coffee machines are cheap, so I do get it. They charge €.35-.5 for a small plastic cup. At home then, I'm tempted to drink a lot of coffee. The trouble is that coffee messes with the biological clock and that's not good when you're trying to maintain a constant rhythm of going to bed at a certain time and getting up early, while getting enough sleep. Back home (home-home), I got into the habit of drinking coffee at 11pm, and that would keep me up until about 2am. So I try not to do that here. Coffee in the afternoon is fine, cause I'm up anyway. But coffee in the morning and coffee at night is bad, cause it keeps me alert superficially. So since I'm prone to having coffee anyway, I started drinking decaf. It tastes the same, and it doesn't (or shouldn't) affect the state of alertness.

The funny thing about coffee is that I don't know where it came from. I remember vividly disliking coffee. The smell was nice, the taste was awful. Coffee with milk and sugar would pretty much kill the natural taste of coffee, it made a big improvement, but it still wasn't good. Somehow I just started drinking coffee a few years ago, not really knowing why. It wasn't really good, it didn't give me a boost, I don't know why I did have it. Then it started growing on me and now I like it. And it's not because it's a drug either, I don't feel a strong effect from coffee. If I'm drowsy and I have it, it gets me a bit more alert, otherwise it doesn't do anything. But when I'm drowsy, I'd rather go to bed anyway, and often I will have coffee (thinking it will keep me up), but then I fall asleep right after that.

So yeah, I totally bought into the coffee culture, and it seems to be spreading everywhere now. It's big in Norway, it's being introduced in Poland with places like Coffee Heaven and in Holland it's always been like this.

Well, not really painful. It seems logical to use that modifier because I'm prone to calling anything grossly inefficient to be painful, but I don't actually suffer pain when shopping. It might as well be painful, I would be done quicker.

The problem is that when I walk into a supermarket, I have no idea what I need to get. I don't plan what to buy in advance, I don't walk around thinking about groceries, I just do damage control. Ok, there's no food, it's 20:45 and I can still make it before they close, off I go. Then I get there and I just wander around. Often the produce section is right near the entrance so I pick up some produce, that's fairly easy. Fruit is easy, cause there's no long term concern there, I just get what I want right now. Vegetables are trickier cause some of them involve dinner and so I have to plan ahead. "If I get some onions now, I could get meatloaf, cook that up in a pan with some pasta souce and boil the pasta." I'm so lazy that when I do come up with a scheme like that, I eat the same dinner for days, just keep buying the same ingredients.

But then there's the question of planning what to buy in what amount. "I could get some bread since I'm here anyway, I don't remember how much I got." You want enough, but not too much. Bread gets old within days, as do most things, so it's a careful balance act between what seems to be a valid meal and what's left in the fridge. Add shopping to that and chaos is achieved. Ok, here's an idea, why don't I survey the kitchen, figure out what I need, then make a list and just buy what's on the list. Well that's no good either, cause I'm no good at coming up with what I need, the only thing I can do reliably is replace what's about to run out. There's too much overhead in planning grocery shopping anyway, often I want to do it on the way back home, then I would have to make a list in the morning and carry it with me, that's no good. Then I get to the supermarket and I forget what I meant to replace. I wander around looking at foods, without knowing what I can use them for. The meat section is tricky, but fish is even worse. What can I do with fish? Any fish product I get seems like a big risk.

"Maybe I'll just do the meatloaf scheme again, but I could use a pasta sauce. Let's see, they have 20 of them and I can't find one that really sounds good. Ok, I'll get the small container so it's less of a waste if it turns out it stinks." And that's when I do actually make a decision to buy, most of the time I'll just look and walk away. Then maybe I'll chew on it and come back.

After much ado, I'm done and I have about 5 carefully selected items in my basket. "Bonuscard?" "Here you go." Apparently, I'm earning air miles on this thing, might as well knock up another 4cm of free air travel today. "Receipt?" "No thanks."

At last, mission accomplished.

As a kid, I used to go on a lot of car holidays, driving to France, driving to Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, England. Starting from Norway, no destination was closer than 2 days away. A beat up old '77 Saab 99 pulling a Kip caravan, that defined vacation to me. And I loved it, it was a great thrill to go to a new country, lots of expectation with it. In fact, that's the essence of it, expectation.

Driving to Italy implies going through the Czech Rep and Austria. Well I've seen those before, it's always fun to go abroad but my mind is on Italy. Because it takes so long, you think about it a lot. There isn't much to do in a car, especially when you're not driving, so it's just looking forward to getting there, wondering what it's like. And that counts for more than you may think, it's built up expectation. So finally you do get to the border, across the border. In the Alps now, it's all mountains on either side of the highway. But this is Italy now, *the* place I've been longing to see, this is so cool, the sheer feeling of being here, in this country, 4km across the border. So what is there to see here? A gas station. Oh look, the signs are in Italian. The prices are in euros. The papers are Italian, people talking Italian at the gas station. That was such a thrill. And that's just the beginning, there is so much more to go. So we keep going, this is the region of Trieste, not densely populated, lots of fields, some housing. Moving along down south, Mestre then Venice. Venice is a big deal, spent the whole day there. There is something very romantic about the car and caravan holiday, it's a rich experience, a gradual one. I think it's more enjoyable on the whole, it feels more real in a way. I didn't stop doing it because it wasn't good, it just wasn't practical. There's no way to speed up a car holiday, it takes 2 days to go Poland-Italy, and what you want to see is Italy, not everything before it. So it's a question of time.

Enter air travel. Well, air travel is quick, no doubt. But it's very different. You not only speed up the travel through the "mundane" areas, you land right at the final destination. When you're on a plane, you don't think "we're now in Spanish air space". For one thing, it wouldn't feel natural, because you don't really know when that happens. But it's more than that, air travel doesn't offer anything while travelling. It's just a time machine in a way, you go in, wait for a while, then you go out and more time has passed in real time than the time you spent in there. One thing is very different from driving - you start the journey the same day you end the journey. In fact, it's much less than a day, it's a matter of hours. (Ok, so if you go transatlantic that's different, but we're not discussing driving to Lima.) What's also true is that travelling by air does not really *feel* like travelling, it feels like displacement. Pure physical movement, there is no other side to it. Landmass doesn't look very different from an airplane whether it's Norway or Spain, it's largely the same, there isn't much to see from up there. And you don't feel like you're travelling, you get on the plane in Oslo, your mind in Norway mode, in home-mode, you're still at home. You get on the plane, people still talk Norwegian around you, pilot talks broken English, that's like being in Norway. And basically nothing happens on the plane, aside from killing a few hours. Then you land in Barcelona a few hours later and you're there. Just like that. Suddenly, you're in Spain. Just a moment ago you felt like you were still in Norway. Expecting to go abroad, but not really having departed yet. In your mind it was still like sitting in Norway with a camera on Barcelona. The first glimpse of the city, of the airport wakes you up. Oh, we're here. You step off the plane, into the terminal, out of it. Now you're outside. I can't believe we're here. That was fast. Ok then, let's get going. And you spend your week in Barcelona and that's it, all done.

What's missing from air travel is the gradual transition from one state of mind into another. From "home" to "vacation spot". In a sense, I think car vacations are more fun, because you get a fuller sense of experience. Starting at home, crossing the border, getting to your destination and you savour every step of the way (since the border at least), it's all new and exciting. By the time you get to Rome and see the city, you've already seen a lot of normal, trivial things that excite you, the fun started a long time ago, it's not merely Rome that's fun. So you get to Rome and it's amazing and it makes an impression. But if you go by air, you get there and you've missed everything leading up to this. So if Rome isn't quite your cup of tea, you walk around the city and you're kinda disappointed. "How was Rome?" "It was alright." There is less to salvage from a disappointing experience when there is less substance to it.

Of course, there is a case to be made for a car vacation in the sense that you can see all the interesting places along the way. I choose not to dwell on that here, because that's a direct tradeoff in car vs plane, but it's obviously a big benefit. Travelling to Cote d'Azur is a lot richer when seeing Strasbourg, Lyon, Besancon, Pont du Gard along the way (I was 8 back then, I may have missed some places we saw).

I'm starting this with an experimental exercise, please go along. First, get a teaspoon and a plate from the kitchen. Go on, I'll wait. Ok, now get a plastic bag. It can be the one from the supermarket, it can also be that transparent one that you package fruit in, it doesn't matter, as long as it's a plastic bag. While you're at it, get some toilet paper, 50cm should do. Ok, go. Got it? Ok, one last thing, I need you to get a glass of water, don't fill it up to the top so you don't spill it as you race back up the stairs. Go.

Great, now let's begin. Dip the teaspoon in the water, so that you have one teaspoon of water. Dump the water in the spoon onto the plate, don't distribute, dump it all in one place. Now take the plastic bag and dry up the water on the plate. Go ahead, dry it up. What? It's not working? Ok, now grab the toilet paper and try the same thing, dry up the water with the toilet paper. What's that? You got it? Good. Now, let's analyze that experiment. You see paper absorbs water, plastic does not. That fact alone is enough to account for the astounding observations made today. (And you probably thought today would be a complete waste, huh.)

No doubt on the basis of such experiments, a bright, young Polish thinker conceived a product that would take the country by storm - the water tight paper napkin. If you stop by one of the countless "bar's" in the country, in cities, alongside highways, they're all over the place, and sample the local cuisine, you will without fail encounter these unique but omnipresent curious napkins. And they have not changed a bit for 20 years. Their most interesting quality is that they're completely useless as napkins. You spill something, try to dry it up with a napkin, it doesn't absorb water. It's not completely water tight, it's semi water tight. It still feels mostly like paper, but with a significant blend of plastic (or what have you) in it. So what if you get your hands greasy from the food? Napkins sure don't do shit for you, that's for sure.

And you have to understand, this is not a regional phenomenon, they have them all over the country, everywhere it's the same napkins. Go to any restaurant in the country and you'll find them. Perhaps in a real upscale place they will have the normal paper napkins, but otherwise that's what you get. The curious thing is that while this is a nation wide product, I don't think they export it. I haven't seen the semi water tight napkins anywhere else. Perhaps they tried and failed, I don't know. If you do come across them elsewhere, please let me know. If you think you may have found them but you're not sure, ask the proprietor for a teaspoon, a plate, a glass of water and some toilet paper..