David Michael Miller
We recently got back from 10 days in Europe. Spending a week and a half in a few tourist centers across the ocean doesn’t make me any more equipped to comment on the world than an afternoon tea at 10 Downing Street made Scott Walker proficient as an international statesman.
So I’ll keep my observations small and contained.
Scarce parking is good for cities. My trip only reinforced what I’ve observed before: Cheap and ample parking is deadly to urban centers. I didn’t see a single surface parking lot or a parking ramp in central Paris or in Bruges, Belgium, and yet those cities were incredibly vibrant. People walked, biked, used mass transit — and drove. Driving in Paris is especially insane and unnerving. But fixing that problem would destroy what makes Paris what it is. Let’s have more congestion and expensive and scarce parking in Madison. It’ll make this a better place.
Good urbanism is good for public health. I didn’t see a single person in Europe that was as out of shape as the average American. There just was no observable obesity in Paris or any of the other European cities we visited. I don’t know exactly why this is, because it’s not like these people are eating light salads and drinking water. Butter, cheese, bread, wine, beer and chocolate are staples. My guess is that they drive a lot less and walk and bike a lot more. See observations about parking above.
We worry too much about safety. We took a brewery tour in Bruges and toured a castle in Ghent, and both had us crawling up and down several sets of steep and narrow staircases. And both the brewery and the castle had just been recently refurbished. Clearly, building codes are somewhat more lax in Europe. But a little bit of danger in life is an exhilarating thing and, more importantly, not being so safety-obsessed creates room for more interesting architecture and public spaces.
Bicyclists don’t wear helmets and they’re safer than we are. Another example of our American safety-obsessed culture is the insistence on wearing bike helmets. Nobody riding a bike on the hectic and crazy Paris streets wears them and the result is that biking in Paris is increasing while deaths and injuries per biker are decreasing. There is strength in numbers. We actually decrease the safety of cyclists when we insist on helmet-wearing because we reduce the number of people who will get out and ride.
Where there’s a tourist area, spend some time walking the other way. We’re glad we saw the Eifel Tower and the Impressionist paintings and Notre Dame and all the stuff tourists are supposed to see in Paris. But it was even more fun to get out into the “real” city. When we stayed in Bruges we spent a couple of evenings just walking away from the touristy areas, and we found cool little places where the locals ate and drank. The proprietors were friendly and more talkative, probably because they didn’t have to deal with bumbling American tourists like us every hour of every day.
The World War sites were inspiring for unexpected reasons. Most people visit Omaha Beach or the World War I trench sites and come away with nothing but respect for the young men who died there. I, of course, felt that too, but I was surprised at how little evidence of the wars remained. In fact, the trenches and the battlefields of Ypres, where some of the bloodiest battles of the Great War took place, have been completely erased over the century since the war ended. A lone reconstructed trench on the outskirts of Ypres sits amid a new industrial park complete with wind turbines. Swords have been effectively beaten into wind blades. The most devastated landscape you can imagine has been pretty much totally healed from the scars of war. That gives a person hope.
I need to work on my French, German and Dutch. I’m terrible at foreign languages. I just don’t have an affinity for learning them. But it’s important to try. I learned a few basic French phrases, and I found that went a long way in Paris. Pretty much everyone speaks English, but they just want to be paid the respect of their visitors at least trying to use their language. It doesn’t take much to understand why. Just look at how many Americans blanch at Spanish-speaking immigrants who don’t pick up English fast enough for them. “If they want to be in our country they should speak our language!” they say. Well, so there you go.
Dianne and I are lucky to have the wherewithal to travel a little and to see a little more of the world. I won’t claim that makes us cosmopolitan intellectuals. But it does stretch our thinking and open us to different ways of viewing things. I love being back home, and I wouldn’t want to import every European idea to the United States. But for all the technology that makes the world smaller, those oceans still allow us to isolate ourselves, to go through our lives without struggling with someone else’s language or perspective. That’s a form of poverty. We came back with less in our bank account, but a little richer overall.
