52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 14: Continental Europe

In Which I Go To Lots Of Countries Very Quickly, And Try To Write About Some Commonalities About The Experience

A funny thing happens when you visit 9 countries in 18 days: you struggle to find a way to write about all of them at once in a satisfying way.

I went from Sweden to Finland to Estonia to Lithuania to Poland to Czechia to Austria to the Netherlands to Belgium in less than three weeks, using ferries and trains to visit all the places that I couldn’t justify more than a couple of days at due to all the competing impulses of this trip.

And I had a lot of fun!

The continental trek in visual form

There is, I will grant, a certain type of person who feels it is their duty to explain to a stranger like me that I am travelling “wrong”, missing out on so many joys of slow travel, collecting countries as though they are check marks, and setting a bad example to the world.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t want to hear from you. So long as it doesn’t involve a private jet or ivory tusks, the best way of travelling is whatever brings someone the most joy.

While seeing so many different parts of Europe in one cumulative rush was fun and fascinating, trying to tell an individual story about any of those countries feels futile.

Instead, here’s a little series of observations that I accumulated from the various quick-hit experiences from Brussels to Stockholm.

• I should start with the ferries I took to Finland and Estonia, in all their glory: working Wifi, outdoor beer gardens, functioning arcade machines, a lack of car alarm announcements, restaurants that, instead of being closed for four years with no end in sight to a consultation on what should replace them, are just open, and yes this is an extended subtweet about BC Ferries.

The experience invited obvious comparisons, though I will also note that a) the ferries linking each country are privatized, and b) prices for foot passengers were about triple what it would cost back home (around $60), and double that for an overnight ferry.

In short, you get what you pay for. More than that, the political culture and essential service nature of ferries in smaller communities would never permit such tradeoffs.

But boy, it a nice temporary change to not hear any car alarms.

• Night trains are having a moment. The combination of a new companies getting into the market and the sky-high hotel prices in big European cities have made more people intrigued about the travel option…especially if you’re a writer for the New York Times or Washington Post.

Professional snark aside, I took two night trains as part of the last leg: one from Stockholm to Helsinki, the other from Berlin* to to Amsterdam, and while a fun novelty, it can definitely be a mixed bag.

If you’re on a national rail service’s line, the route can be a lower importance for the company in terms of staffing and age of the train. If you’re on a new private company’s line, you run the risk of lack of resources and disorganization.

*To wit, my night train was supposed to be in Prague, but the new company was stymied by an accident on a rail line and because of couldn’t get their train to us because of their low priority on the tracks…so with six hours notice they sent an email saying I would have to get to Berlin, some 350 kilometres away, if I wanted to keep my space.

Still, a night train gets you from Point A to B without a hotel stay or wasting a vacation day in transit, a mattress is a mattress, and the randomness of whom you’re bunked with can be fun. As someone who has spent about 30% of this trip in hostels, it certainly wasn’t any worse.

However, if you need absolute quiet and privacy and efficiency, you might want to look elsewhere.

• A lot of the places I went to had old towns, in all their cobblestone charm, because when you’ve had the same society exist in a place for 1,000 years where there’s lots of stone, that tends to happen. At the same time, there’s a risk in these places of tourism gentrification, where the banks and the pharmacies get replaced by gift shops and mediocre restaurants with giant patios, along with the vague sense that you’re visiting a sort of Euro Disneyland, full of vendors and history and car-free streets but little present-day pulse.

This is most prevalent in old towns encircled by a physical wall, like Krakow and Tallinn and Bruges. Because of the physical and visual separation, it’s easy for cities to create clear divides in transit and business regulations and housing and everything else to separate the old from the new, allowing locals (and the local economy) to avoid the hordes of summer of tourists and the unique business demands they bring with them.

In some ways, it makes a lot of sense. But then you go to cities like Prague or Vilnius or Antwerp, where the old and new mush together or slowly transition over many blocks, there’s an undeniable vibrancy, a feeling of a place and a history that is being lived in and actively being shaped, a more interesting demographic beyond a bunch of silly people like me.    

I know which version I prefer. I also know it’s the version that takes more work to make work.

Krakow’s centre square is massive, beautiful…and seems to be 95% tourists.

• Because if you don’t have walled-off tourist land, you risk having your central area completely overrun. Witness Amsterdam, where the canals and port squeeze all the commercial activity to one place, and where the critical mass of people trying to navigate the streets was objectively too much for the available infrastructure. The city’s mayor has become a de facto leader of the push to curb overtourism, and the city has is restricting the building of new hotels while also phasing out cruise ships.

There’s a bunch of different things at play in the surge of the overtourism debate, including the psychological factor of two pandemic summers where people got to enjoy their backyards in relative piece and quiet.

You see this popping up most in places most restrained by geography like Amsterdam and Barcelona and Venice, and the success of policies to try and moderately reduce demand will bear watching.

After all, it’s nice for tourists to enjoy a city as they please. At the same time, Amsterdam was so crowded that the thing I enjoyed most was renting a bike for a couple of hours and getting far beyond the core.

The visual motif of Bike+Canal in the Netherlands is hard to beat

• And then there are the cities that seem to occupy a sweet spot. You don’t hear much about Vienna when it comes to top-tier cities to visit, yet it’s been named the most livable in the world by The Economist for three years in a row.

It’s an interesting place to spend a few days: you can see the influence and money of the Hapsburg Empire everywhere, massive public squares and wide streets and cultural institutions everywhere.

At the same time, it seemed serene compared to other big cities, under-filled compared to its visual grandeur, easy to get into all its most famed museums and attractions. Why?

“The thing you have to realize about Vienna,” a former Vancouver resident who now lives there told me, “is that the population hasn’t grown in 100 years.”

Indeed, in 1900 Vienna was Europe’s 4th largest city (behind only London, Paris and Berlin), with 2.1 million people. Today it’s the 10th biggest (and 18th biggest by metro area), with 2 million people.

In between there were two world wars and a lost empire and a decades-long geopolitical battle that Vienna was incredibly close to yet never physically affected by.

So it makes sense that it stagnated as a world destination, while still retaining a marvellous city plan and central infrastructure, without the population demands that create all sorts of tough tradeoffs. Add in a standard socially liberal European safety net, 60 per cent of people living in some form of social housing, bike lanes and the good paying jobs that come from being a capital city, and you can see why it does well in livability ratings.

Of course, “be the centre of a wealthy imperial dynasty for 600 years and then dissolve without destroying your infrastructure” isn’t exactly a blueprint other cities can copy.

But as I watched the Euro final in a former palace’s grand backyard, I wished it were that simple.

The Austrian capital is much less flashy than a lot of top European travel destinations…but maybe that’s part of the reason it’s so livable.

• There is so much to love about cities in Europe: the ease of getting around without a car, the endless public spaces, the freedom placed on its citizens to use those spaces responsibly, the patios, the museums, the central train stations, the people enjoying their mandatory five weeks of holiday, and so much more.

However, there is one thing not to love: the stoplights for pedestrians.

Let me explain.

In Canada and the United States, stoplights make sense. There is a walk sign. Then there is a flashing “don’t walk” sign, often accompanied by the number of seconds remaining to walk. Then, the sign goes from flashing to permanent. At the same time, the light turns yellow, which you can see because it’s raised up in the middle of the intersection for all to see. Then a second or two later the light turns green.

It seems weird to type all that out.

But in Europe, how stoplights work is a choose-your-own adventure game from country to country, all designed by children on four cans of Red Bull.

The “walk” sign will be up for a short amount of time, in a random place and colour. Then, very suddenly, it will move to “don’t walk”.

Sometimes, “don’t walk” means “don’t start your journey across the intersection if you haven’t started yet”, sometimes it means “the light is turning red relatively soon” and sometimes it means “the light is now red, have fun!”

Sometimes, that don’t walk sign will be red. Sometimes, it will be white. Sometimes, there will be two separate don’t walk icons.

You can’t rely on the actual traffic light to help you, because it’s elevated not in the middle of the intersection, but on the sides of the street, parallel to you, making it only observable to cars.

Instead of the North American efficiency at intersections, there becomes weird 5-10 second gaps where nobody moves at all, a product of poor design paralyzing streets across the continent.

You might say “Justin, just follow the traffic light you weirdo.”

I say “this is a design abomination, and the people must know.”

One of us may be more right than the other.

Bike, Old Building, Patio, Big Tree With Another Patio, More People Walking: Anatomy Of A European Town In Summer (Delft, Netherlands, 2024)

• Travelling through Europe is many things, and one of them is a constant reminder of the charmed and comparatively weightless life most of Canada has had.

In Vilnius, I went to a museum in a former KGB headquarters, which documents the murders and torture sessions that happened for decades in the building.

During my trip to Krakow, I went to Auschwitz, where the displays of thousands of pieces of hair and glasses and suitcases with haunt me forever.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, places bombed 70 years ago dictates the difference between blocks with centuries of heritage, and blocks with mid-century concrete buildings.

And across the continent, there were constant Ukranian flags and anti-Russia graffiti; the reminder of a war in its third year just a few hundred kilometres away.

What is it like for a country when its people live with the reminder of war in a direct, physical way?

I will never appreciate the answer to the same extent as those who live here.

But I do know that on my second to last night of this leg of the trip I was in Ghent, where thousands from across Belgium had gathered for the city’s annual festival, held on the country’s Independence Day.

Across the city, people danced and sang under the shadow of cathedrals built in the age of christendom and city-states, and the band played a song by a man from Winnipeg, about rocking in the free world, and it felt more real than the 8,000 other times I had heard it.

Or maybe it was just 1 a.m. in a beer garden.