emanix‘s home is known on multiple continents as the House of Joy.

At six o’clock in the morning, when about twelve people or so are packing all their belongings into a white van and squeezing in themselves, it might more accurately be called the House of Where Is My Tea And Please Don’t Sit On That, or perhaps the House of Uuuungh What The Hell Time Is It Again?

The goal of this not inconsiderable jiggery-pokery with suitcases, tea, and rental vans was to travel to France, where, I was told, a castle had been rented for our enjoyment for the week. This journey, I was told, would probably require about eight hours, not including the time it took to pass through customs at the English Channel.

When we set off, I had the distinct impression that my views and opinions were not well-respected by the rest of the group. I had proposed a number of entertaining diversions to keep us all occupied on the trip, including singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” repeatedly or punching other passengers when cars of a certain color drove by. These gentle diversions were of incalculable value on long trips during my formative years, and yet they were all shot down without so much as a by-your-leave.

My faith in my traveling companions thus restored, we travelled through Britain (which is a bit like Iowa except that the buildings are older and they drive on the wrong side of the road) until we arrived at the Channel.

The tunnel under the English Channel is quite an engineering feat. Vehicles aren’t permitted to drive through; instead, they pack all the vehicles onto gigantic double-decker train cars, and send ’em through on that.

There’s a passport checkpoint on each side of the Channel. Outbound, we passed through French passport control, who looked at a van packed to the gills with people and luggage and just waved us through without even stopping us. The French, you see, who have a history of being invaded, are a lot more relaxed about these things than the British, who don’t.

I don’t have any pictures of the trains or the tunnel complex, which is filled with weird, loopy overpasses designed to straighten out the fact that the French and the English can’t agree on which side of the road to drive on, nor for that matter which side of the train to load on. Signs warned in dire language of all manner of unfortunate calamities to be visited on anyone who dared to take pictures, and I opted not to test their veracity.

Once beneath the channel, we headed out on the roads in France, which is a bit like Kansas only even more rural and desolate. The promised eight hour trip actually turned into something more like eleven, with not so much as a single round of 99 Bottles to be sung.

The trip was pleasant enough in spite of because of that, or at least as pleasant as such a trip can be.

The destination, however, proved more than worth the whole lot of it, up to and including the early morning departure:

This was our home for the week.

And what a home it was.

The group of us, about 20 or so people who were all part in one way or another of the same extended poly network, took over the place. seinneann_ceoil and I scored the room at the top of one of the turrets, the one on the left in this picture:

It was, as we later figured out, built sometime around the 14th century. The castle is located on the edge of the tiny town of Ciron, in the south of France.

Our room, which was to become the epicenter of much debauchery, was just gorgeous:

As it turns out, retrofitting a 15th-century stone building with modern amenities is a nontrivial task. The place did have electricity, and indoor plumbing, both added after the fact at great difficulty and expense.

Internet access was another issue.

There was a wi-fi network within the castle, at least in theory, which was allegedly connected to one of the many tubes leading to the Interwebnet. Sort of.

That tube was more like a sippy straw, like the kind you get with those little drink pouches that are made of the weird silver plastic and that you stab repeatedly with the pointy bit of the straw in a modern ritual of liquid refreshment whose hideous origin of using bamboo slivers to drain the blood from captive peasants on the darkest night of the year is now lost to antiquity.

I once made quite a tidy sum, when I went with my high-school class on a trip to Washington, DC to spend a few days visiting the Smithsonian. I had two cartons of those weird little juice bladders, see, and the bus trip was rather lengthy, and nobody else had thought to bring any drinks along for the ride. So I did what any good capitalist would do, and sold my juice bladders for a nice profit. Had I been a Libertarian, I would have collected the empty juice bladders, filled them with pee, and then re-sold them as juice, and when my customers complained, I would have said “caveat emptor shall be the whole of the law”…but I digress.

Anyway, the Sippy Straw of Internet Access at the castle was in the form of a direct line-of-sight microwave dish in the front of the grounds, which talked to another microwave dish on another building some miles away. It worked just fine, unless the weather was bad, or someone walked in front of the dish, or there was a lot of traffic on any nearby roads, or the name of the day ended in the letter “y,” or…

Complicating things further was the router, which was sore in need of a firmware update and which tended to crash on a regular basis. The router was locked in a storeroom to which we had no access, so the only way to reboot it after one of its frequent crashes was to reboot the entire castle by killing power to the whole building. As the circuit breakers were near the ceiling, this necessitated standing on a chair and flipping them with a cane.

Rebooting the castle became a several-times-per-day ritual.

You may be wondering why a group of twenty-plus sex-positive, kinky, poly folks would even bother with Internet access in the first place, but the answer is obvious: even good sex only lasts for nine or ten hours, and after that, you have to tweet about it!

The top room in the second turret was quickly turned into an enormous playspace, in part because it looked like this.

If those walls could talk, they’d probably say “Hey, are you going to eat that? Because if not, I’d like some too.”

The main living portion of the castle was three stories, not including the underground cellar and dungeon, which we sadly weren’t given access to. (Not that that stopped some of the more enterprising among us, mind, but I sadly wasn’t there for that.)

Now, one might expect a five or six hundred year old building to have certain…structural difficulties, and indeed that proved to be the case. One structural difficulty, anyway. And a doozy at that.

This is what you see when you walk in the kitchen entrance. Nothing too frightening, right? The steps are the foot of the only staircase to the second and third stories, made of a handsome deep red hardwood of some sort or other.

Don’t let this placid, even mundane, image fool you. Those are no ordinary steps! They are, in fact, part of the Stairy Scarecase of DOOM.

The stairway up is a cantilever, with the steps anchored to the wall on one end and floating free on the other.

And like all cantilevers, including such famous examples as Frank Lloyd Wright’s cantilevered house-over-a-stream known as Falling Down Falling Water, it’s subject to considerable stress on the anchored end.

The stairs, which in one place had pulled from their mounts and were about an inch from the wall, wobbled precariously when anyone walked up or down them. The bottoms of the steps showed significant buckling where the mounts had been damaged.

Apparently, according to some folks who’d talked to the property owner, the stairs had recently been inspected by a structural engineer, who (if I got the story right) said something like “Ayup, could last another five years, could go at any time,” only in French.

Which made the staircase off-limits for kinky sex, at the very least. And also for running on. Or walking on, or climbing, or descending, or…

I spent some time, as I previously mentioned, wandering the grounds taking pictures. There was a small balcony tucked off the recreation room, where the lord and lady of the house once amused themselves by cutting off the heads of heretics or whatever the hell it is French nobility did during the Middle Ages but had since been turned into an entertainment center with a flat-screen TV and a Nintendo Wii, that looked something like this:

The castle was surrounded by the most astonishing quantity and variety of foliage. I have no idea what these berries are, and not wanting to run the risk of hallucinating my dead grandmother locked in mortal combat with Hillary Clinton in a pink tutu, I neglected to experiment.

The groundskeeper for the castle lived in these outbuildings on the grounds. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this myself, only with better Internet access and less, you know, rural France.

The one place I was most disappointed we couldn’t get, other than the dungeon, was the quarters of the lord and lady of the manor. The apartment of the castle’s reigning aristocracy was on the upper level, between the turrets. It had its own private, semi-enclosed balcony, but I couldn’t see what the chambers within looked like; apparently, it had not been renovated and was considered unsafe for occupation. Seen from the window of the playroom, it looked like this.

I was game for finding a plank of wood and trying to build a ramp over there, but as with my suggestions for travel entertainment in the van, I was overruled. Probably for the best, I’m sure.

The Palace of Westminster, where the British parliament meets to do whatever it is the government of a First World European nation does when it isn’t following the fading star of the United States, sits right across the river from the London Eye, where commoners can spend money to ride the ferris wheel and keep an eye on their government.

The clock tower at the end of the palace looms ominously over the Thames, mechanically playing its chimes every fifteen minutes as it marks down the time until the inevitable machine uprising, when we will all be cast into slavery by our shiny new robotic overlords. There is a poetic symmetry in the fact that human hands built this enoumous mechanical time-keeping automaton, which ticks away the hours to our doom.

A lot of folks refer to this clock tower as Big Ben. Technically, that’s not true; Big Ben is a bell inside the clock tower. Wikipedia claims that referring to the whole thing as Big Ben is now acceptable, but in this, Wikipedia is wrong. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit frequently cant figure out whether celebrities and politicos are alive or dead, so its proclamations in matters of gigantic mechanical apparatuses clearly are not to be trusted.

After taking pictures of the Egyptian artifacts, I headed back along the Thames toward the Palace of Westminster. Even someone with so poor a sense of direction as I, in a city I’ve never seen before, can scarcely get lost in this part of London; the palace and its clock tower loom over the landscape like some sort of hulking giant monster in a Michael Bay movie.

The palace itself is enormous–eight acres, I’m told, and well over a thousand rooms. If that’s true, I could quite likely get lost within that building far more easily than within this part of London itself. The Palace of Westminster is large enough to house the entire British apparatus of government, with enough room left over for fifteen rugby teams, two dance troupes, the 22nd Infantry Regiment, the administrative offices of Cirque du Soleil, all three branches of Sarah Palin’s ego, and an Olympic archery team.

I’d love to know how many of those thousand-plus rooms are disused broom closets. For that matter, I’d love to know how many are disused, period.

The architecture of the place is…umm, interesting is a word. Yeah, we’ll use that. Interesting.

I don’t know who the dude on the horse is. Probably just some dude who rode around on a horse making speeches and killing lots of people; those generally seem to be the sorts of folks who end up immortalized in statues atop horses.

The Palace of Westminster was commissioned by King William IV, who had wanted to unload the property onto Parliament but who did not succeed in doing so even though he offered them the place for free. So he commissioned a new palace to be built there, in a conversation that went something like this:

Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Yes, er, well…
Architect of the Board of Works: Sire?
King William IV: It’s nice and all, but it seems a little…er, how to say this? Frumpy.
Architect of the Board of Works: Frumpy, sire?
King William IV: It’s not very…ornate. It needs more decorations.
Architect of the Board of Works: Begging Your Majesty’s pardon, but it is covered with decorations!
King William IV: Well, yes, I’m sure it is. But the decorations themselves don’t have decorations on them!
Architect of the Board of Works: Of course, sire. And let me say that the magnificence of His Majesty’s taste is exceeded only by the tenacity of His Majesty’s formidable grasp on the obvious. I shall rectify this oversight forthwith.
(The ARCHITECT OF THE BOARD revises his draft of the PLANS FOR THE PALACE)
Architect of the Board of Works: Your Majesty, I would like to present to you my revised proposal for the construction of a new palace.
King William IV: Well, um, yes, err… It’s still a bit dowdy-looking, don’t you think?
Architect of the Board of Works: Dowdy, sire? But even the decorations have decorations!
King William IV: Yes, err, well…the decorations on the decorations don’t have decorations on THEM, now, do they?
Architect of the Board of Works: I think I see where this is going. I shall revise the plans at once, highness.

Eventually, the Architect of the Board of Works produced a set of plans that met with William IV’s approval, and construction began. When the palace was completed, they celebrated in the conventional British way by shooting off fireworks and chopping off people’s heads, and everyone was happy. Well, except for the people whose heads were chopped off, but they didn’t count because their heads were off.

There’s a huge park adjacent to the palace, whose sole reason for existing appears to be framing the palace in dramatic and exciting ways.

That, and sitting on the green eating picnic lunches or making out, which were two of the most popular activities I witnessed. sadly, as seinneann_ceoil was still occupied with her meeting, I didn’t have the opportunity for the latter, and I was ill-equipped for the former, so I had to content myself with taking photos that I could later use to write snarky commentary about the British royalty.

On my lengthy loop back around the park and down along the Thames toward the London Eye, I passed this sign.

Now, I do quite like the British people, in spite of the snarky things I write about British royalty, so in the spirit of international friendship, I would like to offer my services as an ambassador of goodwill between our people. Don’t believe this sign. In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar: “It’s a trap!”

Trust me on this. They’re playing a trick on you. The taste of the Deep South is rubbish. It tastes of cheap fried chicken, poverty, country fairs, anti-intellectualism, racism, and deep-fried Twinkies…all for £3.59 for a limited time only.

It’s how they get you. It starts with a chicken sandwich for £3.59, and the next thing you know it’s Brown v. the Board of Education all over again.

On the way back across the river, I saw this building.

I have no idea what it is. Probably the summer cottage of some wealthy British lord or duke or baron or something, I reckon.

London is a much more considerate city than St. Petersburg.

After we said our goodbyes to Franklin D. Roosevelt in Oslo, the ship headed back to Copenhagen, which marked the end of the cruise. My parents and my sister piled off the ship to head back to the US, the land of opportunity and lousy health care.

But not me, oh no. I had other plans.

I had opted, with rather a lot of thrashing about and some last-minute scheduling changes made with a very patient travel agent, to extend my stay in Europe so that I could visit a couple of my sweeties there. My family headed back to the US, but I traveled to London instead, via Germany, where the airports are appallingly primitive. (Seriously, they lack the decadent terminal jetways of the imperialist bourgeoise West, opting instead to park the jets in these enormous parking lots and then sending out buses to transport people to the terminal. It’s a little freaky.)

I sat in a magic chair that flew through the sky and brought me to London, where I was met by the lovely seinneann_ceoil, who brings sexy back in a forty-pound rucksack.

Wait, that didn’t sound right. I mean that she’s so sexy that she carries a lot of sexiness around with her…you know, so much of it that she needs a rucksack to carry…never mind.

I was met by the lovely and very sexy seinneann_ceoil, a day early as I opted to spend a bit of extra time in her arms rather than spending it sleeping in the Copenhagen airport, which had been the original plan. It’s complicated. But it was twenty kinds of awesome, and y’all wish you were me.

Owing to the issues around last-minute scheduling changes, seinneann_ceoil brought me downtown, where she had a meeting that couldn’t be postponed. So she disappeared into her meeting, and I wandered around downtown London for a while.

London is a much more considerate city than St. Petersburg. All the neat tourist bits are located right next to each other, which makes things far more convenient for visiting Americans. A tourist can hit most of them in a couple of hours, without relying on a guy named Igor to drive him around in a Ford SUV.

This is where her meeting was. Seriously. In the building right next to the London Eye, which is what they call that ginormous Ferris wheel on the big cantilever right next to the Thames.

I didn’t actually go on the Eye. They charge about 25 or 30 pounds to ride it, which at the prevailing exchange rates was somewhere around seven hundred dollars or something.

The Eye is cool. First, the support structure that holds it up is a cantilever; it’s only supported on one side. Second, the ring is held in place by a series of cables that work like the spokes of a bike, rather than by a rigid structure. It’s an interesting structure from a mechanical engineering perspective, and the little pods you ride in are held onto the wheel by a sort of cagelike structure that…

You know, I want something like this in my dungeon. Smaller, of course, and perhaps black, but…ahem.

The Eye is, as I mentioned, right on the Thames. There’s a big public courtyard all ’round, where people dress up like robots and make money standing really still. I hear it’s good work if you can get it.

There’s a nice shiny pedestrian bridge across the river, with lots of soaring bits and cables and stuff. It runs alongside a distinctly less shiny rail bridge, utterly lacking in soaring bits but instead made of lots and lots of brick and concrete.

I’m sure it seemed to make sense at the time, but putting the two bridges so close together that you can touch one from the other was perhaps a poor decision from a social perspective…at least if you don’t want folks leaping from the pedestrian bridge to the train bridge. Especially given the nice appealing columns supporting the train bridge, which are convenient places to paint graffiti or drink booze or engage in acts of soccer hooliganism, which I hear is quite popular in London-town.

Fortunately, as it turned out there was a ready answer in the form of the UK’s huge stockpiles of strategic tank traps left over from the War. Properly situated, they discourage graffiti-painting, booze-drinking hooligans with the same brutal efficiency as France’s Maginot Line. And I offer that endorsement with all the gravity it is due.

Such awesome defenses are not to be trifled with. Their effectiveness speaks for itself, really. And they are even more effective against umbrellas, judging from all appearances, than they are against booze-drinking, spray-painting British hooligans!

Graffiti still looks the same pretty much everywhere in the world. How did that happen?

The old train bridge is, as I remarked before, supported by massive pillars of concrete and brick. The pillars seem to be hollow, with doorways leading into them at sea level.

The reason for this curious fact of civil engineering dates back to Iron Age antiquity. Present-day London began as a Roman settlement, of relatively minor trade importance. Around 60 AD, the settlement was attacked and overrun by barbarian hordes led by the queen Boudica, a warrior-priestess who raided Roman strongholds and generally made a pest of herself against the Roman Empire.

It was then, in that dark hour, that the citizens of Londinium, as it was called back then, hatched a daring plan. Besieged, with the city burned to the ground, the desperate Londoners made a pact with the race of naga whose empire beneath the waves of the Thames stretched far and wide, even into the English channel, an enormous and ancient civilization hidden from all but the wisest seers by the murky depths.

The naga, led by their queen Lady Vashj, rose against the barbarians in the dead of night during the bitter cold of winter and routed the barbarian hordes. In gratitude, the citizens of Londinium agreed that from then on, all civil structures built in the Thames would have these doors, leading into secret chambers where the naga could rest and take shelter.

The Roman emperor Nero, impressed by the strength of the naga, dispatched a legion to the newly-rebuilt city, where he killed them all, pausing along the way to wipe out two or three Celtic civilizations that happened to be nearby. To this day, though, Londoners still remember their promise, and build these strange doorways into the bridges and landings around the Thames.

I walked across the bridge, then turned toward London’s downtown, following the path of the river. Along the way, I kept my eyes out for the crystalline spires jutting up from the water, now broken and worn smooth by the passage of time, which are all that remain of the naga civilization. I did not expect to come across an Egyptian obelisk and sculpture.

The weird and unexpected appearance of Egyptian monuments so far from the Middle East stand as a tribute to the sorts of things that folks will do for spices and tea.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, everybody loves spices and tea. You’re not really a civilization unless you love spices and tea. But the British take the ordinary human love of spices and tea to whole new levels. Tea, especially. Tea and also spices, sure, but mostly tea.

Whereas other, less inspired societies are content to trade for these things, or perhaps just grow them, the British built an entire empire based on the acquisition of spices and tea by force. In support of this empire, they invaded distant lands and engaged in slavery and made amazing progress in the invention of whole new kinds of atrocities, just to keep the spice, and the tea, flowing. They were so obsessed with the spice and the tea that the East India Trading Company and its navigators, who the tea had mutated over four thousand years, soon gained an iron grip on interstellar travel, which they defended with ruthless fanaticism.

It’s quite good tea, by the way. seinneann_ceoil made some for me. It’s good enough that Im actually considering investing in a teakettle myself.

There’s nothing like being held for ransom and then squabbled over like the white meat on Thanksgiving’s turkey that focuses the mind. There is also, it must be said, little good that can come of having one’s mind focused on Knight Rider. There is a dirty little secret of Knight Rider, and I don’t mean the one about how it jumped the shark with the Cylonesque talking car’s evil twin. No, the dirty little secret of Knight Rider was that it was a children’s show that nevertheless managed to run ads aimed at grown men.

But again I digress.

Crisis averted and safe passage assured, I ventured farther into Oslo, and soon stumbled upon the magnificent town hall near the center of town.

It is a brooding and majestic place, a fit center from which to rule a vast empire. You can tell by the horses. Horses engraved in stone always mean business.

Along the column-flanked overhangs to the left and the right, rows of wood carvings remind us of what is to come during the Final Days, when a great darkness shall descend upon the earth.

This particular carving shows the winged serpent-beast Nidhogg gnawing one of the roots of Yggdrasil, the World-Tree. In his malice and evil, he tears perpetually at the root of all things, hoping to strike oil. Some say that if he succeeds, there will be a great calamity, with the lifeblood of Yggdrasil gushing out uncontained during three long months of wailing and suffering, with much hand-wringing and the fall of many tears, before finally being staunched by a combination of a gigantic cap positioned by remotely-controlled robotic servants and a relief well being drilled alongside the gashes of Nidhogg’s enormous fangs. Afterward will come a Tribulation, in which a great king will be forced to give up his idyllic life of yacht racing and abdicate his throne in disgrace.

Others, of course, say that this is merely a fanciful tale told for the entertainment of children, and that nothing like this can ever really happen.

The Oslo town hall is richly decorated with statues and carvings. Im not sure of these geese are wrestling or having sex, but then, there have been times in my life when I was not sure if I was wrestling or having sex. When I was in high school, I had this crush on the girl next door, see, and she and I would often wrestle with one another…but I digress.

Or are they swans? The ornithology of waterfowl, like the distinction between wrestling and sex, is not one of my areas of expertise.

I do quite like the statue atop the building’s facade, though.

The whole thing has a vaguely Stalinesque feel to it, or it would if Joseph Stalin hadn’t been such a cob-faced prude.

The balcony is just lovely. From here, the Grammaton Clerics issue their edicts to the city’s citizens, and it is to here that any citizen suspected of either emotion or artistic expression is taken in order to stand trial. And by “stand trial,” I mean “get shot a whole bunch of times in dramatic slow motion by Christian Bale, but, y’know, back when he was cool, before he became a mincing, emotionally volatile momma’s boy like he is now.”

One day, my secret lair will have a balcony that looks just like this.

The main door to the town hall is decorated with this mural on its lintel.

It depicts, as near as I can puzzle out, two Masters of Capitalism, perhaps John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld, shaking hands to cement a deal, while all about them the machinery of commerce hums, guided by Adam Smith’s hand toward a Utopian Worker’s Paradise under the wise and benevolent rule of Kim Jong Il…though I may have my fairy tales mixed up. Whatever, I’m sure that whenever two guys shake hands, it’s always good news for everyone else.

The door itself is also adorned with artwork, though done in a radically different style.

Here we see a brave knight, who represents the Tetragrammaton Council, battling with a great serpent, who represents the rapacious oil-seeking Nidhogg, while clad in a fetching military hat, which represents the wisdom of Ayn Rand shining like a beacon over Her disciples at Enron and Goldman-Sachs, with his sword, which represents his penis.

The town hall was closed the day I was in Oslo, which was very sad; I really wanted to see the machinery of Norse justice in action. As I ran around taking pictures, though, a woman cracked the door and watched me from the inside. I have no idea if she was armed or not.

The Norse love their severe, narrow balconies almost as much as they love their cannon.

One day, my secret lair will have…

No, screw that. One day, my secret lair will be this place. Only with, like, lasers and stuff. Because lasers are cool.

On the way back from the town hall, I found a curious bit of graffiti on the wall. I don’t understand Norse graffiti.

It appears to my eyes to have been written by someone whose passion was as great as his grasp of English spelling and grammar was tenuous. Though to be fair, it’s a bit surprising to see graffiti in any English, broken or no, in a city whose dominant language is nothing like English.

The strangest discovery in Oslo awaited my return to the ship. Nestled beneath a tree right on the edge of the port one finds, most unexpectedly, a giant stone statue of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I didn’t expect to see him sitting here, so far from home. It seems that, like many Americans, I am underinformed about our own glorious history, and about the role our past leaders have played in many other nations during their time upon the world stage.

But the Norse have not forgotten, oh no. They remember. They remember President Roosevelt’s service to their nation, when he led the Norwegian Air Force against the armies of Napoleon during the Battle of the Bulge. They remember how he brought light on that dark day, using his powers to turn the tide of battle at the moment when all hope seemed lost.

And they remember, too, his promise to them and to all mankind, that he will return again, when the final battle of Ragnarök has begin and Odin has been slain by the great wolf Fenrir. They remember his pledge to rise once more, to take Odin’s seat at the head of the gods and to battle the forces of evil for the salvation of all of us.

Oh yes, they remember.

With the Bridge of Dreams behind us, we made port in Oslo, Norway, the Most Expensive City on Earth. Prior to winning that dubious distinction, it was a Viking capital, widely known as being Home of the Most Hats With Pointed Horns on Earth. Early in its history, it was also launching point for the Most Savage Coastal Raiders On Earth, winners of the coveted World Cup of Rape, Pillage, and Murder forty-three times between 799 AD and 1023 AD.

One might expect such a colorful history to make for an interesting city, and one would be right.

The early Vikings were masters of the sailing ship, and modern-day Osloians, or whatever it is you call natives of Oslo, are reluctant to give that tradition up. The harbor was crammed quite full of wooden sailing ships when we arrived.

I’m not quite sure what they made of our strange vessel of painted metal, and its lack of sailing-masts and oars and any other visible means of propulsion. I half expected to be greeted as some sort of strange seaborne god, arriving on the shores of the city in a magical floating hotel and casino that moved under its own power and levitated on water with the power of elfin magic alone.

What actually greeted me was this…oddly proportioned statue.

The sculptors of Norway have it all over the sculptors of Russia in that, it would seem, they have actually seen a real human breast up close, and are reasonably familiar with its general overall shape, size, position, and disposition.

What they would seem less acquainted with, however, is other particulars of human anatomy, in regards especially to things like hands and feet. Good Lord, I have not seen hands and feet that big since World of Warcraft. And I have a dwarf paladin, so I know disproportionate extremities when I see them.

She can crack walnuts with those toes, I reckon.

Right on the edge of the port is Akershus Castle, built on the edge of the water in the 1200s as defense against roving bands of maritime raiders. Quite why Norway, the source of the world’s roving bands of maritime raiders, felt the need to defend against them is a detail that escapes your humble scribe.

The castle proper was under significant renovation when we arrived, and so looked nothing like its Wikipedia entry. I was able to visit part of the castle complex, though, which to my eye looked largely like a collection of stone houses behind a wall.

One of the main buildings of the fortress complex featured a stone wall bristling with a rather startling array of cannon, the better to…err, I don’t know. I’d say “beat back ravening hordes of invading Vikings,” but, well, you know.

And speaking of walls, the Norse were rather good at them, I must say.

This formidable twelve-foot wall of stone entirely surrounds the fort. It rendered the entire castle complex, and the city that the castle protected, virtually impregnable to attack from the time of its completion in the late 1200s all the way up through 1982, when advances in military technology led to the invention of the stepladder. Overnight, this once-awesome defensive structure was made obsolete. World powers shifted in the blink of an eye, as often happens with new, disruptive technologies, and the golden age of the Norwegian empire was irrevocably behind it.

The Norwegians do love their cannon, though. This one looks out over the wall toward the busy urban center of Oslo’s downtown district.

If that office building ever declares war, man, Oslo will be ready.

The city reacted with more shock and less awe to our arrival than I might have preferred; it wasn’t long, in fact, before those fearsome cannon swung ’round our way.

Initially, they demanded a million dollars and the head of Dick Cheney as ransom for our safe release. Hours of tense negotiations ensued, during which compromises were made on all sides. They finally agreed to accept a dozen old VHS tapes of “Knight Rider” episodes and a signed photograph of David Hasselhoff, which at the current exchange rates were worth approximately the same amount as their original demand. During our stay, the American dollar was so far in the crapper that a minute of Internet time in an Oslo internet cafe cost about $842.67, or a two-pence coin in British pounds sterling.

This is, it might be argued, not the right time for an American to be vacationing abroad. Seeing as how our itinerary included several stops behind the old iron curtain, though, one could say that there’s a tradeoff between visiting during a time when the dollar’s in the toilet but Americans are warmly welcomed with open arms, or a time when the dollar is invincible but Americans are warmly welcomed with firing squads. One takes what one can get.

Just a stone’s throw from the torture chamber and amber museum in Gdańsk is the Church of St. Mary, the largest brick Gothic church in the world.

I’m sure their geometric proximity vis-à-vis hurled rocks is probably no accident, as churches and stones seem to go together like whiskey and hunting. It is, even by the scale of St. Petersburg religious edifices, altogether a grand structure, towering hundreds of feet over the faux Old Town like Godzilla over a small Japanese seaport on Tokyo Bay.

I couldn’t get a decent picture of the church proper, as it’s crowded so closely by neighboring buildings that the only way to do it seems to be helicopter, so I grabbed this one from Wikimedia Commons.

I will admit, when we arrived in Gdańsk I didn’t expect to find myself looking down at the spires rather than up at the spires.

The church started out as Lutheran and then eventually went Catholic, in a reverse of the normal order of things ’round the Baltic. I’ve never been quite sure about all the doctrinal differences ‘twixt the two, except that Catholics follow the Pope and Lutherans follow Lex Luthor, the archvillain who nailed a list of ninety-five complaints to the door of the Fortress of Solitude, protesting among other things the sale of indulgences, the role of confession in the forgiveness of sin, and the prescription-only status of Rogaine.

As a currently Catholic church, St. Mary’s lacks some of the more exuberant display of not-idols-no-really that many of the other churches in Eastern Europe boast. It is nevertheless still quite a magnificent structure, its soaring white interior carefully calculated to produce a maximum sense of shock and awe in the psyche of an illiterate serf.

There are a few not-idols available for the faithful to not-worship, but for the most part it’s all towering arches and huge naves and such.

This church has seating for 25,000 worshippers inside. Yep, you read that right. That’s three zeros after the comma, meaning the Blessed Mother can still kick some ecclesiastical ass and show those so-called “megachurches” in Texas how it’s done, yo.

The Church of St. Mary was, once upon a time, home to a large number of artistic treasures. That was before the Thirteen Years’ War, the War of 1569, the Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the Soviet occupation. It’s been looted by a Who’s Who of historical world superpowers: the Teutons, the Prussians, the Nazis, the Red Army, you name it, all of whom have pretty much treated it like a drunk eighteen-year-old girl backstage at a hair metal concert.

It does still have a few treasures that haven’t been carried off or melted down, though, like this bit of sculpture,

I don’t know what it’s actually called, but I mentally dubbed it “Jesus Does a Facepalm.”

It’s also home to this enormous two-story-tall astrological clock:

This thing tracks the astrological constellations and about eleven thousand and two important dates in the lives of the hundreds and hundreds of sacred figures of Catholic monotheistic tradition, and–get this–it even has clockwork saints who chase each other around the top of it like Punch and Judy after a free and vigorous exchange of ideas over the issue of whether or not the essence of the Trinity can be divined wholly by the carnal senses without the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit.

Some believers claim that the world will end in 2012, when this astrological clock finally winds down. Others await the triumphal coming of the Great Savior, who with the Golden Winding Key of the Epoch will once again set the clock into motion and usher in a new Golden Age under the Sun of Precious Stones, once thought by the Aztecs to have been destroyed by jaguars but now known to have been under the couch with the TV remote this whole time.

Near the entryway to the church, a guy was sitting behind a card table with a sign in English advertising climbs up the tower for five zloty, which is something like a buck fifty or so. Behind him was a narrow wood door with a small flight of stone steps leading up.

My sister and I opted for the climb. Now, what I expected for my buck fifty (or, more accurately, for my sister’s buck fifty) was a climb up one of the turrets to a place where we could look out a window or something. What I actually got was an episode of television’s Fear Factory, only with 70% less First World obsessive-compulsive concern over safety and avoiding gross bodily harm.

The steps start out deceptively, sort of like giant alien killer robots do.

They go up straight for a distance, then turn into a spiral nightmare where each step may be narrower than your foot, but at least it’s about three feet high.

But, as with giant alien killer robots, they’re more than meets the eye. I figured the spiral bit would go up for a while and come out into a room where we could look out the windows and say “Oooh!” and “Aah!”. Then again, I also figured that Sarah Palin would have gone away by now, so that shows what I know.

The main vault of the church got bombed out in WWII, and has never been restored. Instead, they just kinda stuck a big concrete stairway around the inside of the shell and called it good.

What the photo on the left fails to convey, aside from the stark raving terror of this place, is the darkness. That’s somewhere around a ten-second exposure you’re seeing there.

Imagine climbing up a dozen stories on a crude concrete stairway in near-pitch-blackness, and you’ll start to get the general idea. Now picture that while being chased by giant killer robots from space and you’ll have the plot, or what passes for the plot, of a Michael Bay movie…but I digress.

The stairway did not lead out into a room where we could look out the windows and go “Oooh!” and “Aah!” Instead, it led outside, onto a three-foot by four-foot metal platform bolted to the very top of the church. They hacked a hole in the roof and put a doorway there, with a few metal steps leading up to the platform. All in all, there were 406 steps, not including the five metal steps up to the platform.

A guy was sitting on a folding chair on the platform, reading a book. For five more zloty, you could borrow the binoculars he had hanging around his neck.

Not that you needed them. The view was amazing–enough to make the scary climb up hundreds of steps in near-total darkness and the giant alien killer robots totally worth it.

When I said I didn’t expect to end up looking down at the church’s spires rather than up at them, I meant that literally.

Gdańsk is one of those towns that always made me pull my hair out whenever I worked on the Saudi version of the Royal Caribbean cruise catalog; it has a lot of churches. All of which are probably bigger than a Texas megachurch, and most of which look downright tiny when looked down on from up atop St. Mary’s.

Each corner of the topmost section of the church is protected by a lightning rod, and each lightning rod has a small metal flag embossed with a year (possibly important years in the church’s history, perhaps?).

Now, personally, I’ve always thought that putting a lightning rod on a church is a profound vote of no confidence in the divine power and mercy of the Lord, myself.

The lightning rods atop St. Mary’s feed into thick cables that serve double duty in helping prevent hapless tourists from plummeting to an unfortunate death many stories below upon the storied streets of Gdańsk, which is perhaps a dubious double duty were it not for the fact that, presumably, they don’t let people up here in the middle of a thunderstorm.

The gentleman with the book and the binoculars mostly ignored us while we took in the sights and mostly tried not to think about the 406 steps, not including the five metal steps up to the platform, that loomed in our future.

The trip down was, if anything, even scarier than the trip up, in no small measure because on the way down you can sort of see, dimly, the vast distances that one could travel feet over teacups if one were to make a misstep. My sister has a mild phobia of stairs as it is, so yeah. Terrifying up, twice as terrifying down.

About midway down, I paused to take a picture of a bell.

It’s a big bell, just kind of hanging there, with no way to ring it or anything; mostly, I photographed it to distract myself from the horrifying fear of imminent and sudden death.

We eventually made it down, and left through a different door than the one we entered through. We came out near this…this… Well, I’m not really sure what it is.

It looks kind of like a fountain, sort of, only there’s no water, which might in its own way be a fitting icon of religion in general. The women clustered around it are obviously pious; you can tell by the generally unhappy expressions that you always see in carvings of the pious people. In the annals of religious tradition, the intersection of “pious people” and “happy people” is almost always a null set, which may have been what inspired Friedrich Nietzsche, himself a profoundly unhappy person, it seems (but in an entirely impious way) to observe “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

There’s a statue behind the notafountain fountain thing, of some dude carrying a child. Don’t blink! Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink. Good luck!