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Despite not really being ready to pack up and go, I’ve found myself in Europe for the last nearly two weeks: for one night in London, then a few days in the Netherlands, and now (by the time this blog gets posted), Paris. It’s an entirely different world to North America in some ways, and on the other hand it’s just strange to have my life in bags and be travelling again (minus the 20kg possibly on a ship by now to Sydney, and the random objects that didn’t make the cut and stayed in Montreal). Each time before I venture to a new city, I have a strange fear that I’m not going to enjoy it, or I won’t make the effort to do so, or it’s not going to work out, and all I want to go is get to somewhere I know. Once I get going though, it’s great fun.

Thankfully, after Montreal, Europe has a few familiar faces. Although my friends in London are mostly out of town for some reason, I’ve now stayed with my Hillel house-mate for a few days in Amsterdam, and will soon hopefully stay with another in Paris. Which limits the amount of time I need to spend worrying about security and cost in hostels. Hostels here, it seems, are more expensive than in America, although their free breakfast might be a larger buffet. And while they have more security, they are perceived as less safe. So far, at least, I’ve walked away with what I came in with, except for a little food consumed here and there.

Food can be more difficult, too: In America, everything kosher is clearly labelled so, and although that doesn’t promise that the bagels you buy in the supermarket will taste any good, you know you can find them. Here, like in Sydney, everything works on lists, and if you don’t know it, or don’t hold it, you wouldn’t know what to buy and what not.

Correspondingly, I no longer walk around the streets wondering who’s Jewish and who not, like I could in New York, or at McGill. Even if there are Jews here and there in Europe, most don’t show it very loudly, except in their set areas. And yet Jews come up all the time; they are the history here: an old synagogue, a former economy, a street, an individual, a monument, a rumour. But in person, one identifies very few. But of course they exist, like the photographer that approached me and Naomi in Dam Square, Amsterdam, as we put tomatoes on our humous sandwiches, and greeted us, “It’s not easy eating kosher in Amsterdam…” He, holding a long-lensed mechanism, broke our conversation with occasional photo-snaps, while telling us about photojournalism and the art of the photographer. He entitled it a ‘derasha’.

A more surprising diffrence between the two sides of the Atlantic is that in Europe, people still pay to connect to the internet, it seems. American hostels would commonly have WiFi net connections for free. Here people still go to “Internet Cafés”, while in Montreal nearly all cafés would provide the Internet at no extra cost, albeit that you were expected to bring your own computer. In general, here one doesn’t see laptops on coffee tables anywhere as much as in North America. Maybe it’s just a suggestion that “coffee is coffee; work is work”.

And with coffee comes smoke. While in Australia I’ve quite happily gotten comfortable with smoke-free indoors, the rule here still seems to work on the old principle that “it’s okay to smoke unless we tell you not to”. Montreal recently went as far as to say smokers must distance themselves from building doorways by a couple of metres, but while most ignored that, there still wasn’t smoking inside the buildings.

Of course the mix of languages, too, is vastly changed from the Americas. While for me the English accent signifies “tourist” (which got very confusing at a few points), in the streets of Westminster, the snap-happy visitors speak Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, a completely different linguistic porridge to what I’m used to.

Then there are the bubblers (water fountains) at many public “restrooms” in America, but absent here. And the street signs which in Europe are on the walls of the street they refer to, which makes them obvious to find, but harder to read. And the theme of black metal gates with gold decoration wherever there is somewhere important. And other little things.

The bigger things are things that really create the entire atmosphere, like the city being constructed around smaller neighbourhoods which have their own square and tower, castle or church. There are monuments everywhere. Yet one thing in their design is also that most streets in the city are consistently built up to the same height, around 6-8 floors, which means that as you walk down them you are always shadowed on either side by their presence. And unlike Chicago or New York it’s not the complete shadow of sky-scrapers on either side. These old, 6-storey buildings on either side really define the feeling of walking around in Europe.

Now in my second week in Europe, I wish I had time to relate tale after tale… But I’m not sure I have the effort like I did in San Francisco. I still have a half-written blog entry recalling Pesach! So many stories left untold and I know that my laziness in this area only means I will likely forget them all. It also doesn’t help that no one’s regularly offering me free WiFi…