Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

By Jamie Trecker

LONDON - The city is quiet, pummeled into depression by a spring that has been anything but spring-like. The markets that line Camden Town and London Bridge, selling summer dresses and tank tops, have been despairing of takers. Most of their time has been spent sitting about, smoking cigarettes and swearing baroquely.

The Germans are coming, or so the papers tell us each morning. The problem is, they aren’t here yet, and when they get here, it’s unclear exactly what they will do. For reasons known only to UEFA, the Champions League fan fest won’t open until Thursday, and it is about as far from Wembley as one can get – it’s across London in Stratford. And news about the tournament? Well, once suspects that since no English team is in it, the less said the better.

In Trafalgar Square, across from the National Gallery, one of the viewing boards was just being put up. On the Tube, ads began rolling today reminding folks to tune in at 7:45 on Sky (In America, coverage begins on FOX at 2 ET.) But there was little hint of any of this in today’s papers. The news was of Tony Pulis’ departure, Wayne Rooney’s curious choice for a baby name and the tale of Manchester City’s latest foray abroad. (The Sun, never one to miss a chance to put the boot in, had Frank Lampard doing just that in an “exclusive” interview about Rafa Benitez. Go on, Frank!)

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

The fact is, London doesn’t seem very cheery about the prospect of this Champions League final. We heard tales of how 200,000 fans were going to descend on the city – and then little else. Did they not come? One enterprising vendor set up a stall with Germany’s national treat, the currywurst, only to find that at high noon, he was left reading the newspaper with a lot of left-over sausages. He and his cart had vanished by the time I returned this afternoon.

It all feels a bit anticlimactic. And yet, there is a game even further under the radar.

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May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Thirteen: Strawberry Propaganda

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

By: Jamie Trecker

LONDON, ENGLAND

Weather is a constant, favorite topic here. The word itself is used as noun, a verb, an adjective and an epithet. This will strike Americans as surprising given that the weather rarely changes: it is miserable, and damp.

The English do like to put the best possible spin on things, so the daily weather reports – which, as I mentioned, rarely change – are accompanied by short and uplifting items. Today’s recounting of the miserable cold and the flooding up north was tempered by a flack proclaiming that this year’s English strawberry crop will be a bumper one.

“Everyone will get their English strawberries this year,” the man promised, as if this had been a pre-existing national concern. “They will be juicy and sweet and abundant.”

Disgusted by this pro-strawberry propaganda, I made my way to the British Library, which, as it happens, has a major exhibit on called: “Propaganda.” Americans will be greeted in unsettling fashion, with J.M. Flagg’s Uncle Sam pointing your way in. There is precious little on strawberry flogging, but quite a lot on weather, public health, and insidious politicking through the eight rooms, punctuated by the library’s impressive paper holdings.

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May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Twelve: The Fall

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

By: Jamie Trecker

LONDON, ENGLAND

Shanna called me from the States yesterday. It was her birthday and it was hot in Chicago, 86ºF and rising. Unfortunately, it’s still October here in London, and I have been dodging the twin plagues of downpours and frost. Anyway, she wanted me to get her a nice gift.

So, I did what any sensible person would do: I looked in the NME, and then headed out to Clapham Junction to see The Fall on the twin grounds that it is always warm in a pub and the Fall are freaking great.

For once, I was not the oldest man at a punk show. This is due to the band’s longevity: they’ve been about since the late 70s and are currently touring in support of their 30^th LP, “Re-Mit”. Their core audience –- anorak-wearing record collectors suffering from varying stages of male-pattern baldness – is almost sweet in its uniformity. All of us in that bracket got there right at 7 when doors opened, and then dutifully went right to the merch table. Greybeard after greybeard bought the band’s newest album on vinyl, some for the second or third time, and then held onto those purchases for four hours during the show.

16

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Eleven: Where’s the love?

Photo: FOX Soccer

By: Jamie Trecker

BRUSSELS, BEGIUM

The conductor called the train: “Lille, Calais…and Chelsea FC.” The platform gave off a small roar of approval. Chelsea fans were headed home with another piece of silverware in their tuck. They seemed underwhelmed.

They should not have been. The Europa League final marked a number of firsts for the denizens of the Bridge: they became the first English team to have won all three major European titles (including the now-defunct Cup Winners’ Cup); the first European team to hold both European titles on offer simultaneously, and surely the first team to win back to back titles with, ahem, “interim” managers.

But as warmly as Roberto Di Matteo was regarded by the fans, his replacement, Rafa Benitez, is despised. Last night the ArenA and the arena of social media alike were filled with the moaning that has characterized Chelsea’s season.

Commentators made passing reference to the plastic flags that littered the away ends and a comment Benitez had once made about despising them. Unforgivable! The team started slowly – perhaps a reflection of the fact that they have now played more games in a season than any other English side since the Arsenal of 1970-71. So what! Chelsea’s now secured European play and won a major title under Rafa and erased a dangerous mid-season swoon. He was greeted by bedsheets and cardboard with the same message: “WE WANT MOURINHO.”

Photo: FOX Soccer

15

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Ten: Going van Gogh

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

By: Jamie Trecker

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

The calendar says May, the weather says October. Amsterdam, or at least Mother Nature, isn’t exactly welcoming Chelsea and Benfica with open arms. With the rain, and the wind, and the rocking of the houseboat up and down, up and down, I decided to do what people do in Amsterdam in bad weather: go to van Gogh.

The Museumplein is one of the most-visited areas in the entire city. It’s also one of the most controversial. Once a bus terminal with connection to the airport, today it looks like a barren college quad. There’s nothing wrong with that, until you learn that it cost millions upon millions of euros to make this open field. And it’s not even done yet.

The Museumplain is emblematic of Amsterdam’s struggle with public works in general. Amsterdam can be breathtakingly beautiful, particularly along the Golden Bend – but what they have done to some of their public spaces is tragic. A case in point is their contemporary art museum, the Stedelijk, the scene of a series of fiascos during a painfully long redevelopment. The result, an unflattering tack-on derided as “the Bathtub,” has been an architectural laughingstock since it opened.

But there are treasures amid the carnage. The Van Gogh museum, itself recently re-opened after a face-lift, is currently showing an engaging exhibition about how the master worked. It’s a great survey of his process, his contemporary influences and the dizzying end results before his suicide in 1890.

Van Gogh was not a born artist: he barely knew draughtsmanship and struggled to keep up with his colleagues. But he was a hard and ruthless worker, with a mean editorial eye. Van Gogh was also broke – his brother Theo floated him all those years while struggling vainly to sell his works at the gallery he owned – so he frequently re-used canvases. One of the most cunning things about the current exhibition is how the curators have framed his canvases so you can see both sides. On one frame, may sit a study for the “Potato Eaters;” on the other, one of his later, dazzling self-portraits.

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May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Nine: Bobbing and Weaving

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

By: Jamie Trecker

AMSTERDAM – In what is becoming a habit on my travels, I’ve ended up in a strange place. I’m parked in a houseboat along one of the main canals in this city.

‘Why, Trecker?’ you ask? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Other “good” ideas of mine have included: traveling from Berlin to Warsaw on a Soviet-era sleeper train; going to El Salvador at the tail end of the guerra sucia; and visiting Scotland in July. It has been argued, frequently and loudly by my partner, that my travel plans suffer from too much whimsy.

However, I am happy to report that despite bobbing about on the Ringvaart van der Harlemmermeerpolder, that this is hardly the worst decision I’ve ever made. I’ve got a windmill to the left of me, a pumping station to the right and water out my front door. It’s quite peaceful. There are rabbits and ducks about. People row past and wave. One could get used to this.

Houseboats are fixtures along Amsterdam’s canals. The potted history is that, after World War II, there was a sharp housing shortage in the city combined with a surfeit of suddenly decommissioned naval barges. The Dutch are nothing but ingenious and today an estimated 2,500 families live along the inner waters of the city. Then, it was cheap and practical. Today, it is not: there are no more moorings left for sale and the cost of a houseboat has gone through the roof. What was once bohemian has gone upscale, meaning that today you can find “boat-els” and private lessors throughout the city.

Photo: Jamie Trecker / FOX Soccer

The canals form a web across the city, creating nearly a hundred small islands with nearly 2,000 bridges. They make Amsterdam a maddening city to navigate even with a well-thumbed guidebook, a cellphone and a sextant. (Every landlord I’ve met here opens their spiel with “when lost, please do not call me and tell me you are ‘on a bridge.’”) But if you’re going to get lost, you might as well do it the way the Dutch do, on a bike. I got a blue one, with a basket and a bell. The bell is important: the bike has no brakes.

12

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Eight: Jam it up!

By: Jamie Trecker

LONDON— It was the matchup we all anticipated: Barcelona and Real Madrid in London for the Champions League final. And it did take place – but not at Wembley Stadium.

This weekend, the 02 Arena here is hosting the Euroleague basketball finals, the latest attempt to bring the game to England’s capital. Major soccer clubs boast basketball teams now – Olympiakos and CSKA Moscow are the other two sides involved in the four-team tournament — and the game’s increasing popularity has meant that England is involved in something of a tug-of-war. The NBA have been holding exhibitions here for several years and talk of a permanent franchise here has grown more serious than speculative.

Basketball has yet to make the inroads in England that it has across Europe. The fact that these games were held at all was treated as a bit of a comic footnote by the sports pack here, and a way to get “Barcelona” and “Real Madrid” into a headline for the web. But 16,000 people didn’t think it was a gag, showing up for the three-game series on a weekend normally given over to the FA Cup.

11

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Seven: Camden Town

By: Jamie Trecker

CAMDEN TOWN, LONDON

American English is a funny thing. In most places the phrase “day off” means a nice picnic with the family. For a writer, a “day off” means go out and find something to write about, and be quick about it.

So, I found myself in markets, in Camden Town.

Much to my partner’s jealousy, I rented a flat above a comic book shop in the neighborhood, and showed up thinking it was the Camden Town of my youth. There’s a legendary rock club here, the Electric Ballroom, where I once saw the Dead Kennedys, and the area has long been known for art and music. At least it used to be.

Today, it is an area of London that most folks would call “alternative” while using air quotes. It has become a magnet for tourists and the Hot Topic crowd, all of whom have turned up to see where Slade and Sex Pistols once played. It’s also quite vibrant, and so crowded that they have to shut off the Tube stop for safety reasons on Sundays. Buskers of all stripes still line the streets – you can hear everything from folk to death metal in a two-block journey – and stalls hawking clothing and boots both sides of the avenue.

10

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Six: Writer’s bash

Photo: Action Images

By Jamie Trecker

LONDON, ENGLAND

Last night Gareth Bale completed his sweep of the awards circuit by collecting the Football Writer’s Player of the Year Award here at a posh hotel off Kensington Gardens. It is the most prestigious of the awards, and a throwback to the days when the relationship between the media and the players was very different than it is today.

It is one of the few times of the year that the people who play the game and the people who cover it get together and act chummy. Most of it’s off the record, a lot of it is fueled by alcohol. In years past the, the gala was notorious for its punch-ups and the sheer volume of hangovers it could produce. It’s a very English event: several hundred unwashed scribes poured into the cleanest possible suits, all with exactly the same rep tie. The aim is not to stand out (advice ignored by the American, who was put into his suit by his partner and foolishly wore a bow tie) to avoid embarrassment and then get pissed.

There’s lots of back-slapping. Glasses of lager are sloshed, and it’s a badge of honor to get the next round. If you’re unwary, you can end up holding six pints inside five minutes. The players and managers walk about freely. Rafa Benitez was eagerly explaining, well, something, to anyone in earshot. Andre Villas-Boas was extremely polite. I ended in the urinal next to Roy Hodgson.

8

May

Trecker’s Travels, Day Five: Bank on it

Photo: Getty Images

By Jamie Trecker

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

Bank holiday. It’s the hottest day of the year to date in England. Shops are closed. Englishmen, and their dogs, are recumbent across the nation. There is absolutely nothing going on, and that’s exactly how this nation likes it.

I took a walk from Salford round Manchester’s city borders and back. Greater Manchester’s about 500 square miles, but the old city, bordered by two rivers – the Irwell on the west and on the east by the Medlock — remains compact. Even an out-of-shape writer can go from Deansgate to the Rochdale Canal, then back from Great Ancoats through the Northern Quarter in a couple of hours.

Just across the river, tucked into a small neighborhood just across the river, is Castlefield, the old Roman heart of the city. A small reconstruction of the fort – which was originally made out of timber – stands on the site, dwarfed by the neighboring bridges. Some folks walked around to see it, but Castlefield is better known today for its vibrant weekend market and burgeoning bar scene. That Market starts on the edge of what once was called Mancunium in two weeks time.