Caliboy in Brooklyn

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Table of Contents for Germany and the Low Countries 2026

International Pynchon Week 2026, Dortmund, Germany, baby!

We made it! There and back!

All in All...

Holy hell, a fantastic trip!

Originally part of the plan was to visit Bruges and possibly Ghent, but as the heat dome settled down on us in Dortmund, we called an audible and decided to skip both. Too much time in a bus on multiple days.

The kids did well, but obviously not every second was sunshine and happy times. We rode bikes, we painetd pictures, we ate some exotic grub, and we sweated the sweat of weary Yanks. We watched soccer and some of the Dwayne Johnson Hercules movie.

Cass found numerous young ladies with which he could start conversations. Camille painted pictures and made jokes, and both kids kept up quite well with our shenanigans. They may have been complaining and bitchy for plenty of it, but they made it all the same, all seven to twelve miles of walking a day.

Hopefully the memories will be there for our youngest. I think they'll be foundational for Cass. Time will tell.

Good times, for us, for sure. We've been at it for a few years now, but...I guess this is what we do.

Movies on Planes

As I round out the collection of pieces from our European adventure, I thought I'd mention some movies that I saw on the airplanes.

Back in 2019, I saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time on the airplane to Rome (and watched it on the way back, too).

The big movie for me this time was this year's Oscar nominee "The Secret Agent:"

I watched the first forty minutes without sound, for lack of headphones, but since it's subtitled, it didn't really matter.

Have you seen it? It't hard to describe. It sticks with you, which is something. The opening scene has our star, Oscar nominated Wagner Moura, driving a VW Beetle into a gas station outside of Recife, in northern Brazil, during Carnival in 1977. The corpulent worker wearing a shortsleeved button-up shit with no buttons buttoned, fills his tank and explains why there's a corpse in the parking lot covered with a sheet of cardboard. Cops do show up, but not for the corpse ("They'll be here soon for him," they say), but really just to extort Wagner Moura's character. He gives them his remaining cigarettes.

It's engaging, but hard to explain why, and the whole thing is like that.

I also watched, fully silently, a little Quebecois movie with the translated name "Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person:"

It was fun and silly.

Lastly, after I did get some earphones, and after I finished The Secret Agent, I watched one of the Kenneth Branagh's Poirot movies, "A Haunting in Venice:"

When I saw it had both Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh in it, I thought, hell yes. It's both a haunted house story and a murder mystery, and it's filmed sumptuously in Venice.

I've tried to find all three since we've been back. Tough crowd right now, anyway.

Forgot one!

I thought we had another graphic novel purchased on this trip:

We purchased this at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. It's done in a comic style very reminiscent of Herge's Tin-Tin.

I haven't finished this yet, but it has a young man looking around his grandmother's attic for items that he could use to celebrate her on Queen's Day (a Dutch celebratory holiday, on the sovereign's birthday). While looking around he finds some pictures and some evidence that, eh, there are some secrets in the pasts of his ancestors. Like trying to keep a small family of Jews hidden from the occupying Nazis.

It's harrowing and sobering at the same time, like much of the Dutch approach to their checkered past in the tropics.

This was in a bag that wasn't looked through until today. Whoopsie!

Field Trip to Zeche Zollern

This was the field trip to the coal mine in Dortmund. The Zeche Zollern coal plant was the first that ended up powered by electricity. The weather was beginning to warm up, and the tour guide spoke only German (our original English-language tour guide fell ill), but it was a fun time.

We rode the bus through Dortmund for an hour, which helped inform my view of regular life in that western German city.

"Zeche" is a German term that means 'colliery' or 'mine,' and "Zollern" refers to a German royal family, a noble family, the Hohenzellern, that dates back to the 1200s-ish.

Anyway, the whole area was modeled after a noble courtyard:

But, of course, the central building housed the mine officer's offices, which had a panopticon effect.

Inside some of the buildings, which were modeled after cathedrals, the stained glass windows were adorned with images of labor:

The workers were all assigned a chain basket within which they would store their clothes for the day. They would, using the chain, pull down their basket, change clothes, and pull it back up to the rafters:

This is one of the main coal working centers. The diagonal lines were for pulling elevator chords, elevators for both people and for coal.

It was said that if you were not at roll call in the mine at 6 am, you wouldn't get paid for the day. The best way to make sure you were at roll call, was to take the Men's Elevator. If you slept in, or otherwise missed the Men's Elevator, you'd have to take the last coal elevator before roll call. The Men's Elevator went at a respectable 40 kph (about 11 mph), but the coal elevator rocketed down at 70 kph (nearly 20 mph).

There was a large transformer room, with cool gears and capacitors and all kinds of cool electro-mechanical stuff.

I tried imagining the sound and the action of the place in full working order.

But then it's hard to ignore the Allied-forces pummeling Dortmund took as a center for coal industry and munition factories. It's almost surprising any of the old infrastructure still exists.

Dortmund was picked as the location for the IPW in parts because of a quote from Gravity's Rainbow: "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet," that, and a university's faculty that loves and teaches multiple classes in Pynchon's works.

Besides a snafu on the way home, this was a great little trip, and to see the inner workings of an energy industry that's now a museum. It was said that it had to lay dormant from the postwar period until the 1990s before they figured they could turn it into a place for learning, or before they learned how to do that, and once the realized that people would come to learn.

On the day of this field trip I had Corrie's phone. She had mine to take back to the SIM card people to make it sure it would work. Hers worked, and for that day we switched. She got mine working, and we switched back, but not before I took a handful of pictures that took a while to get access to.

Germany! Trying to come to terms with their own monstrous shadow in real time.

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Laundry, In Three Parts

The First

Friday. It was hot. Super hot. Sweaty. The last things for the IPW were done early, and later we were going to go to Domicil and see a violin show. I walked down to the laundromat and tried to figure the system out. You had to choose the machine on a screen. Then pay on the screen, then walk over to the machine and press start. It was 9€ per wash (yikes!), but he dryers were only, like, one euro for 12 minutes, but one dryer didn't get hot at all.

Ahh, domestic duties.

The Second

We were leaving the next day from Brussels, and the need was there again to get the piles of sweaty clothes through the washer. I put eyes on while we were walking around town the day before, or earlier in the day, and it was similar to Dortmund in that it was on a screen where you have to choose, and pay, and get change. I took the kids with me, but then Corrie finished up her museum visit and came and got them, as I sat, sweaty, wearing my swim trunks, their mesh undergarment making the time unpleasant.

The Third

We were heading home a few days later, but the kids weren't going to make it with their underwear, and so I headed out again one bright evening in Amsterdam, with the heatwave having mostly broken. This was the closest spot, and there were very few washers or dryers, and I'm not sure if anyone using it while I was there lived in the neighborhood. Again, it was expensive, and again it didn't work very well, but...that's the job.

No place took cards---all were cash only. That could be challenging, but we made it work.

Nothing like laundry while abroad, baby!

Pub Crawl Guide and Beer Discussions

In Antwerp we ended up in a bar after we left the kids to watch one of the tablets with the third Sonic movie. It was hot outside and very hot inside, a cube of wood and posters. There were four patrons, the bartender, and the two of us. Of the four, two were Americans visiting from a cruise, their pub crawl guide, and his friend, who had shown up to help out, or just join his buddy and his crew. Since that crew was just a single couple, it had been a very personal pub crawl.

Once we all started talking, we ended up learning some things from the pub crawl guide.

He told us a story about how Belgium became the king of beer countries, in that, the country with the most brewers per capita was Belgium.

After the French left, and after the final breakup with the Netherlands was consummated, in the new Kingdom of Belgium it was apparent that elections needed to happen. The two main factions were the conservative Catholics and the non-conservative others. But the elections showed the reality: the most popular folks up for election were brewers.

The brewers won the first elections. They were the most popular candidates, they had the most name recognitions and positive vibes. To win in Belgium, people realized, you'd have to be a brewer. More people joined the ranks of the beer makers, just to be more palatable for political votes.

And this is why Belgium is the King of Brewers.

We drank plenty of beer while in Europe, and we tried more Belgian beers than normal. They were complicated and pleasant.

At Mikkeeller's the second time I had a Bubblegum Bottles from the Scottish brewer Vault City Brewery:

I didn't take this picture

We were talking to the very cool bartender for a while. The young lady was local and her boyfriend was from London. He didn't like the fresh fruit, which led me to think he may have been south Asian. He was trying to learn Dutch. Maybe he did okay with listening and understanding, but speaking wasn't there yet. She seemed happy and content.

She'd had another boyfriend that got married somewhere crazy, or had someone close to him married somewhere crazy. It helped with her backstory.

She helped me understand the hard-I (ee) "ij", and we talked about language, like what she was forced to learn (German and English).

When I ordered this beer she smiled. "Yeahp. That's a good one." She poured the shot of beer, 25cl, a cup, her back to me. She turned, "And the color. The color gets people." And she put it in front of me.

Blue. It was blue. The foam was like spirulina foam.

But it was good. So good. It was just...refreshing and acidic and sweet, and balanced. Bubblegum, but, like, sour, and balanced. I've even looked at getting some since we got back. No dice.

They don't have La Chouffe here either:

This one either

And...that makes me sad. Maybe I should actually look.

In Germany I bought beer from the gas station across the main street up from where we stayed. Used coins. I bought Bitburger, Carlsburg BIG, and whatever else random 1.69 € pint cans they had.

And now we're back to big IPA country. And brewers maintain a safe distance from politics.

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