With Europe within the baggage | Culture | EUROtoday

Back in 1985, Spain was making ready to enter the European Economic Community, an entry that occurred on January 1 of the next 12 months. The newspaper urged that I take a literary journey by these international locations that to any extent further had been going to be our companions. Ortega’s dream might lastly come true, and he by no means uninterested in repeating that the answer to Spain’s downside lay in Europe. We Spaniards entered that membership, maybe, with out having fully misplaced our minds and though we had been assigned the tail automobile, the reality is that our nation was touring on the similar pace on that practice. When Churchill was requested what he considered the French, he replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know them all.” Well, the identical factor occurred to me, so on these journeys I saved myself the difficulty of attending to know the European inhabitants one after the other; However, I nonetheless preserve some flashes evanescent from that have.

Upon arriving in Holland, I already knew that the perfect potatoes in Europe had been these from Friesland, a area within the north of the nation, which had deserved to be painted by Van Gogh in his early days. In these work you possibly can see peasants, women and men, crouching on the bottom sowing these tubers, then amassing them in a bowl. I believed they might be doubly tasty after Van Gogh had painted them, but in addition in Holland there have been Rembrandt and Vermeer from Delft. Upon arriving in France, getting into by Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais I noticed many grandmothers with a lulu canine, retirees whose our bodies had been stretched out on the leash of an Afghan, solitary gents with violet jaws created from slurping up many oysters who had been being pulled by a mastiff in entrance of the blue rope of the bay. If at that second that they had requested me what I wish to be, I’d have answered: it would not be dangerous to be a poodle within the arms of a mature girl in Nice and to sit down on the desk on the Le Chantecler restaurant within the Negresco resort to know that in France true culinary knowledge is within the literature on the menu and never on the plate. And additionally in France there have been the impressionism of Monet, the fauvism of Matisse and Alphavilleby Godard.

Upon arriving in Denmark, within the middle of Copenhagen I discovered the Christiania anarchist reserve, 100 hectares of absolute freedom surrounded by barbed wire fences. On a wall on the entrance this slogan was written in purple letters: “No God, no Lord.” In that libertarian commune some roughly human beings lived in a cabin constructed among the many treetops. On the island of Funen I attended a mass celebrated by an Anglican priestess who had paid her manner by ecclesiastical research by serving in topless in a cocktail bar. I had by no means attended a spiritual ceremony carried out with such exquisiteness. And additionally in Denmark there have been the story author Andersen, the thinker Søren Kierkegaard and the Little Mermaid.

The octogenarian Josep Pla was requested what his finest dream was. “Being 20 years old and going to Italy for the first time,” he answered. It is commonly mentioned that gods are modified earlier than meals. If that is so, Italy has achieved the miracle of imposing pasta on half the world, a really aromatic delicacies constructed by cooks who’re bakers and likewise Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Vatican had been in Italy. In Germany the scar of the Berlin Wall was nonetheless on show. To the east of Checkpoint Charlie had been dusty storefronts of pickled cucumbers and to the west the glittering splendor of Kudamm Avenue. From this aspect, the Mercedes star on high of a skyscraper challenged the Marxist doctrine that was pouring from the lollipop on the opposite aspect. However, for me Germany was nonetheless the ascent of Thomas Mann’s magic mountain. Luxembourg was inexperienced hills and on that juicy pasture the blue-eyed cows allowed themselves the posh of mendacity down with out consuming, not like what occurred with the Spanish cows. Flocks of Eurobureaucrats loaded with papers handed by Luxembourg, coming and going from Strasbourg to Brussels.

In Belgium, that June twenty first was the pageant of the solar and naturally it was raining. According to what they informed me, the primary lesson to be taught in Belgium is to reside with water. However, within the eating places of Brussels the fusion of highly effective German delicacies with the delicate preparation of French delicacies has been constructed and the outcome was a murals on the service of the palates of the MEPs. Upon arriving in Ireland I already knew that in that nation Joyce is a illness and it was the case that each one the nuns had been Irish. In Dublin, after ingesting 5 pints of Guinness in a row, you ran the chance of discovering your self praying the rosary with your loved ones. With Portugal hand in hand we enter Europe. Greece was there because of Socrates, Pericles and Plato, who had based the foundations of democracy, an phantasm that right this moment dangers breaking into items.