The European Tourist Trap Finals

In honor of tonight's NCAA men's basketball championship game, I present to you a different sort of bracket: the European Tourist Trap Finals, featuring head-to-head match-ups between the finest-slash-tawdriest the Old World has to offer. Click for the large version.

Here's a close-up of one of the regions:

Round-by-round recaps:

First round

Over in the Art (Or Something) Region, two major favorites faced off in our very first match-up: Michelangelo's David, always a solid contender, versus press darling Mona Lisa. All that recent attention must have gotten to Mona Lisa's head, though, because she just couldn't stand up to the valiant war hero, though it was a close match-up. Meanwhile, tabloid star Manneken Pis had his way with oft-ridiculed Glockenspiel, making the most of the crude-but-innovative form that got him here in the first place.

Hofbrauhaus was the early favorite over in Food & Booze, and it played the part in its first-round challenge against Alt-Berliner Biersalon. This one was never close—Hofbrauhaus just has a deeper bench and a huge advantage in the intangibles: the tubas, the lederhosen, even the sports drinks. Casa Botin also lived up to its reputation, stopping stuffy Parisian comer Le Grand Colbert; this one turned pretty quickly into Death in the Afternoon, as the Spaniard was unstoppable.

Among the Big Ol' Monuments, many expected an impressive run from Checkpoint Charlie, on the strength of having overcome so much adversity in recent years. The Colosseum had other plans in mind, however, and showed off its gladiator spirit in the win; it also seemed to be carrying the extra weight of an entire city, as the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain both fell in enormous upsets in earlier rounds. The Italians had less luck in the other regional match-up, however, with Florence's Duomo falling to late French resistance and the Eiffel Tower's deceptively intricate efforts.

Finally, in the Public Space Region, Vienna's Prater couldn't take advantage of its towering star in the middle—the rest of the team looked like a bunch of clowns and carnies, to be honest—and fell hard to Montmartre. And in an intriguing contest between two waterway-based public spaces, Amsterdam's Red Light District made all kinds of questionable decisions, basically rolling right over and submitting to Venice's Grand Canal.

Second Round

The action resumed with a classic David-versus-Urinating-Toddler contest. Advantage: the Wee Whizzer, Manneken Pis, although he had continued foul trouble throughout. In a huge upset, Casa Botin beat out Hofbrauhaus, which many had expected to go all the way. Casa Botin credits its age and experience, as well as its cuchinillos. The monument showdown featured two of the biggest names out there, with the Colosseum cracking quite a bit as time wore on but barely eking out the victory over the Eiffel Tower, which too many times squandered its height advantage by failing to elevate quickly. Montmartre continued its strong run, and though its match-up with the Grand Canal featured several highlight-reel shots, the Parisians had the upper hand.

Semi-Finals

Man-oh-Manneken Pis!! The “irreverent little chap” just kept surprising us with his cheeky play and jaw-dropping creativity and ability to do anything and everything—this kid seems to wear all kinds of hats, and wear them well. Casa Botin superfan Ernest Hemingway had to be escorted from the premises mid-way through the competition for reasons unknown. Solid-but-not-flashy Montmartre kept doing well for itself in the other semifinal, showing off its own spunk and standing proud like a quiet but sacred city on a hill. A powerful showing.

Final
Parisian stalwart Montmartre had the best stuff in the end, starting with a solid foundation, a great outlook, and overwhelming crowd support. Manneken Pis ran out of his supply of tricks, but returns a hero nonetheless. He'll be back, no doubt, although someone really needs to help him fix his dribbling problems.

On that note, thank you all for being a part of this amazing competition, and we'll see you next time on the beaten path! 

The package tour of the road less traveled

Is there a single part of the world today that does not have its own package tour? I rather doubt it. "Off the beaten path" has become just another marketing phrase, one used to attract the authenticity-seekers who are so over the tourist trails of Europe and Southeast Asia. There comes a point, though, when that endless--and, importantly, mass--quest for the unspoiled becomes not just absurd but wholly unsustainable.

I think we've reached that point. Two articles from the New York Times in the past week provide ample evidence. First up, from last week's big "41 Places to Go in 2011" package (with my emphasis added at the end):

34. Iraqi Kurdistan
As United States forces withdraw from Iraq, a handful of intrepid travel companies are offering trips to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, which has enjoyed relative safety and stability in recent years.

...

Visitors can tour significant cultural landmarks like Erbil’s citadel, which dates to the Assyrian empire, and the site of the Battle of Gaugamela, which ended in the defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great and led to the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. The biggest lure is the opportunity for authentic cultural encounters. “Authenticity is something that can be lost so quickly as development occurs,” said Janet Moore, of Distant Horizons.

Yes, correct, it's true: with development comes a decline in authenticity. Now, development can have plenty of positive effects, too--improved medical care, infrastructure, economic growth, etc.--but never mind all that, we want authenticity! But who can tell me where the first wave of development and authenticity-leech might come from? Tourists, perhaps? 

And now on to the second article, from yesterday's Times:

Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs

When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.

Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) andScott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.

...

Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.

Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”

He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.

“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.

It's tempting to be snarky and note that this can't end well and wonder if Jon Krakauer will be on hand to write the book about the inevitable disaster this will turn out to be. But I don't want to joke; it's really not funny. Truly: this is a tragedy waiting to happen (though I'd love to be wrong). This guy has never skied before, and surely he isn't the only member of this group who is astonishingly ill-prepared, but who seems to think that writing a big check and training in entirely different conditions (not on skis, not in the cold) is all the preparation he needs. All in the name of ... what? Competition? Hubris? I can think of a hundred ways to prove yourself with less chance of dying. The Ironman Triathlon, for one.

The article continues: 

David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.

He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.

Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.

“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”

Seriously: there are some places tourists shouldn't go. For their own good.

And also for the good of the place. Look, I get the appeal of the authentic and unspoiled and untouched (here, travel journalists, have some more synonyms). There's nothing so transcendent, so stirring, as beauty in the raw.

But I'll say it again: it's not sustainable. Even if the Antarctic tourists don't die (and, truly, I wish them all the best), there's a good chance some of them will have to be rescued. They'll leave garbage. And even just by being there, as tourists, they send a message to the rest of the world: come on down! Anyone can do this! It's totally extreme ... and totally awesome! I await the filming of the first sports-drink commercial with Shaun White snowboarding down a glacier and doing a McTwist 1260 over some startled penguins.

In a 1972 profile of Arthur Frommer for Harper's, Stanley Elkin observed, "It's no accident that Arthur Frommer, the Pill, and credit cards are simultaneous phenomena. Everybody deserves everything. You only live once. Screwing for everybody and Europe for everybody too. This is the egalitarian key to a proper understanding of Europe on Five Dollars a Day."

Today, it's not just "Europe for everybody." It's "the whole world for everybody." And as much as I like the notion that travel is becoming more egalitarian, I can't help but recoil at the perception that it's everyone's birthright to see everything, do everything. Not sustainable, not sustainable. 

It's time to put the brakes on this kind of tourism. Not that anyone from the New York Times travel section or Conde Nast Traveler or Travel + Leisure or, for that matter, Budget Travel reads this blog, but if they did, here's what I'd say: please stop with the lists and stop with the authentic and stop with the endless quest for the unspoiled. I know it's a game you play. I know it gets the readers who draw the advertisers who pay your salary. I know you like to talk up "green" travel and ecotourism (although I respectfully submit that there's no such thing as a truly environmentally-friendly lodge in the rainforest, especially one that then attracts more people and more lodges to a place that was truly untouched and ... well, there goes the neighborhood).

But. Maybe it's time to rethink things a bit. How about an article or two embracing the beaten path, finding new ways to appreciate the seemingly-cliched cities and landmarks? How about mentioning that the truest ecotourism is to leave these "unspoiled" places alone--not to rush to get there first so you can later brag that you saw them before they got overrun? How about acknowledging that we're all tourists, no matter how far-flung, and what matters is not finding something your friends haven't found but appreciating and understanding that thing--that culture, that place, that food--on your own terms, in your own way? (Oh, and if you want someone to write a story with an offbeat take on the beaten path, well, I might know someone ...)

Of late, one of the big culinary trends, at least the US, has been classic comfort food done right. Witness the rise of the gastropubs like the Spotted Pig in New York or the nouveau diners like my hometown favorite, the Town Talk Diner--places that take hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and the like and remix them, often with high-end ingredients. There's a parallel phenomenon of street-food fusion, such as the Los Angeles food-truck phenom Kogi, which serves Korean barbecue tacos.

I think it's time for the travel world to follow suit, to embrace the familiar but in unfamiliar ways, to find the new angle on the old cliche. One of my favorite things about traveling on the beaten path is that it's the crossroads of the world--you meet people from the Official Local Culture but also immigrants who live there now and tourists from all over the globe. In Brussels, you can eat frites and doner kebabs with EU officials, Malaysian tourists, and Algerian-immigrant locals (to be sure, this particular scene is possibly an idealistic  pipe dream ... but then, so are most of the touristic visions of Provence or Bali). The New Old World ain't just churches and museums and stuffy restaurants, so don't treat it like a static, monolithic place.

Or there are the places that have stood the test of time, becoming tourist traps, yes, but gloriously so--the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, Casa Botin in Madrid, landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. These are places with stories and history; there's a reason they're iconic, there's a reason people go there. And that's one of the other things I love about the beaten path: that sense of being part of something collective, of trying to understand the reasons why so many people come here. What is that history? What are those stories?

I could go on, but the Madrid chapter is calling me and, well, you probably take my point by now. If there's one theme I harp on throughout this blog, perhaps too much, it's this: there are plenty of stories left to tell on the beaten path, because it's always evolving, developing unexpected contours and detours and landmarks. It might take some extra effort to find those interesting things, but they're there, all over, sometimes hiding in plain sight.

So if you're reading this, travel magazine editors, there's a story for you. And please stop with the authenticity-hype. I can think of a few tourists in Antarctica who will soon be deeply regretting that they didn't stay on the beaten path.

Is social media the new guidebook?

So this writer for The Guardian is preaching what seems to be a common refrain among the social media lovers: smart phones killed the guidebook dead. Twitter is the only path to travel salvation.

A few choice quotes and rebuttals:

1. A quote about the joys of constant contact.

Four weeks ago I visited Manchester on a short break. I took a change of pants and socks, a spare T-shirt and my mobile phone. When I arrived in the city, I told Twitter that I was hungry, and within minutes I was gorging on corned-beef hash thanks to a recommendation from a fellow Tweeter. I held my phone up to Piccadilly Gardens, turned on an app, and itsWikipedia entry flashed across my screen, overlaid on to the grass in front of me through the camera in my phone. I opened another app, and dozens of local suggestions were hovering around me. There was a bar 288m from where I was standing where I'd get a free drink if I mentioned a secret word to a barman called Angus.

Okay, look, whatever works for you, go for it. I won't pretend that there's One True Way To Travel.

I'll grant you that social media can offer more and better options (in terms of restaurant recommendations and the like) than guidebooks. I mean, there's the potential problem of information overload--you'll probably get too many suggestions and some conflicting opinions--but, okay, if you can sort through it, there's undoubtedly some good stuff there. Guidebooks, in theory, cut to the chase and give you some curated picks (the best of this, the cheapest of that), but if you stick with a guidebook, your options will be limited, and I'm not sure that's necessarily preferable to info-overload. When I did my guided-by-the-masses experiment in Rome, I got some good recommendations and I got some clunkers. No matter what your source of information, your own experience will be hit or miss.

What I find more problematic with the better-living-through-Twitter argument is that it demands not just constant connection with the rest of the world but constant feedback. People joke that Twitter is just a bunch of people posting what they had for breakfast, but I'm more annoyed by all the people who ask, "Where should I have breakfast?"

How about that place right there in front of you, eh? How about asking someone on the street? How about not spending an hour a day seeking advice and validation from your friends back home? How about realizing that you can wander into a dumpy restaurant and have a horrible meal . . . and still get something out of it, a story, a friend, whatever?

Furthermore, when you're checking in with your friends, how much other time are you spending online? Are you also checking Google Maps? Your e-mail? Your RSS feed? Weather? Enough. I've said it before, but I truly think that willful ignorance (up to a point) leads to the most enjoyable travel experiences. Aren't surprise and discovery part of the joy of travel? Shouldn't travel involve getting beyond your existing networks and world views? Shouldn't it be about finding your own way, rather than continually asking your friends for help? All the world need not be a stage, and all your time need not be spent in pursuit of the best, the hippest, the friend-approved. Let loose, get lost, get in to trouble, make NEW friends.

I honestly think that the single most important travel app on a smart phone is the off button. Make it up as you go along.

2. A quote about how awesome it is to have so many friends and to be so popular.

And then, about 18 months ago, I started travelling with Twitter. I headed off on assignments without planning a thing. I began in Paris, where I arrived at the Gare du Nord and began slinging questions into the ether. For 48 hours the people of Twitter guided me around the city, from backstreet art galleries in obscure eastern suburbs to glorious belle époque eating halls in Montmartre. Every tip was tailored to my exact time and location.

In other words, you've got people. (As of this writing, the Guardian writer, Benji Lanyado, has 4,863 followers on Twitter.) And, as someone with a prominent platform, you presumably get a lot of re-Tweets and forwarded information. You're able to spread the word quickly, and get a wide range of responses precisely because of who you are and what you do; people want in on your experiment. That's all fine and good; I have no problems with that. But I have a big problem with suggesting that it'll be like this for everyone, that it's Just So Easy to do this, that everyone can do it: just ask the question and you'll get tips "tailored to [your] exact time and location." It doesn't work like that. Most people are still better off with a guidebook (or using Trip Advisor or online resources).

The steps to a pleasant trip are NOT simply:

1. Buy an iPhone.
2. Set up Twitter account.
3. Broadcast that you're going somewhere and need tips.
4. Get tailored tips; meet locals; eat well; find enlightenment; live happily ever after. 

3. A quote showing some ignorance about the purpose of guidebooks

When I got home, I was a guidebook refusenik. They offered me nothing beyond the decently concise history section.

Uh-huh. And how about the section on the culture in general? On tipping? Or safety? Packing for the climate? Etiquette and taboos? Appropriate attire? Politics? Transportation? Visas? The curatorial role of the guidebook writer goes beyond stay-here-eat-there, and there are plenty of times when you can't rely on your Twitter followers to bail you out, even if you have access to them ("Tweeps: Got 10 cops shakin me down. :(  Need tips plz ASAP. How much 2 bribe?") These are areas where I specifically don't advise willful ignorance and where a guidebook--or internet research or a chat with a local--can be invaluable.

The best travel guides serendipity and common sense. Twitter and Facebook and their online peers are fine as supplements to these, but not as substitutes.

Oh, and when you're in a forest or remote area or even the Metro in Paris, good luck with getting a signal. Don't panic if you don't. Enjoy it instead.

What do you think? Are guidebooks doomed? Is Twitter better? 

If you're interested in more takes on the future of travel guides in the internet era, World Hum has a nice round-up of articles here. 

The things we no longer carry (portable record player, anyone?)

Temple Fielding wrote the guidebook that Arthur Frommer loved to mock, Fielding's Travel Guide to Europe. "It maps out ... the short, quick road to insolvency that most American tourists have been traveling for years," Arthur wrote.

In 1968, eleven years after the first edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day--and a year after my mother toured the continent with that same budget-oriented guidebook--John McPhee profiled Temple Fielding in The New Yorker. After Fielding's first book came out in 1946, McPhee, writes, he "was soon operating virtually without competition as councellor to the millions of American tourists who have traversed Europe in the postwar years, and his closest competitors became, as they have remained, scarcely visible behind him."

I don't have numbers to back me up, but I strongly suspect that this is a case of The New Yorker's stereotypically myopic, upper crust worldview getting the best of it, this being the magazine that was, famously, “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.”  There's only a cursory mention of E5D and Arthur Frommer in the profile, in this dismissal: "Fielding does not think much of Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day. 'We don't respect Frommer,' he told me in an even, sad voice." But even though neither McPhee nor Fielding get any deeper into the subject, E5D was gaining ground rapidly was already a cultural touchstone by this point; it's telling that Fielding came out with his own Super-Economy Guide to Europe in 1967.  E5D already was the go-to book for the younger, more frugal set (like my mother). The first run of the original edition of the book was 5,000, and according to Arthur, "it no sooner reached the bookstores than it absolutely disappeared." In Mom's letters, she mentioned Fodor's guidebook and Europe on Five Dollars a Day. Not a word about Fielding's.

The most telling difference between Fielding and Frommer, to my mind, is not in the places they recommend staying or eating (although the contrasts there are indeed profound) but in how they packed, the things they carried:

Temple Fielding's packing list (from McPhee's profile):

The [large raffia] basket and its standard contents go with fielding around Western Europe on all his annual trips, which ordinarily last for five interrupted months. In it Fielding keeps a bottle of maraschino cherries, a bottle of Angostura biters, a portable Philips three-speed record-player, five records (four of mood music and "one Sinatra always"), a leather-covered RCA transistor radio, an old half-pint Heublein bottle full of vermouth, and a large nickel thermos with a wide mouth.  

... Fielding also carries a large calfskin briefcase that was designed by him (it is full of compartments) and was made by Loewe, a Spanish purveyor of stunningly fine leather goods. The forty-one items inside the briefcase are standard on all his travels. [These include] his sterling-silver paper stapler (by Tiffany), his plastic fork, his plastic spoon, his stud box, his dwarf American cigars, his standard toothbrush, his collapsible toothbrush, his rubber bands, his paper clips, his eraser, his credit cards, his peanuts, his two-inch bottles of Johnnie Walker ... his Fernet-Branca ... his working notebook ... his ink, his Scotch Tape, his ballpoint-pen refills, his undercover notebook for surreptitious notes ... his alarm wristwatch, his Buech-Girod alarm clock ("It's the world's smallest; it yodels") ... 

Fielding uses two suitcases, and in them he packs thirty-five handkerchiefs (all of hand-rolled Swiss linen and all bearing his signature, hand-embroidered), ten shirts, ten ties, ten pairs of undershorts, three pairs of silk pajamas, eight pairs of socks, evening clothes, three pairs of shoes, a lounging robe, a pair of sealskin slippers, and two toilet kits. ... He wears one suit and carries two. 

Okay, this list goes on. There's also a spinning top. And a mink-covered beer-can opener. You get the idea--the idea being that, goodness, (a) that's way too much, and (b), that sounds like the packing list of a Bond villain. Five bucks says Fielding knew how to use each of those items as a lethal weapon.

And here's Arthur, or rather, his wife, Hope, who wrote the "Packing to Save Money" chapter:

The tourist who carries heavy luggage and a complete wardrobe to Europe spends a great deal of money unnecessarily. ... A light suitcase means freedom. ... If you make the right decision, you'll do the following when it comes time to pack. You'll first buy the lightest suitcase available. You'll then fill it with the skimpiest set of clothing your courage will allow. Having done that, you'll then remove half these clothes from the suitcase, and depart on your Europe trip. 

For men, this is Hope's packing recommended packing list:

3 pairs of shorts (dacron or nylon)

3 cotton T-shirts

3 pairs of socks (at least one pair should be nylon)

2 handkerchiefs [recall that Fielding packed 35]

1 sweater

2 Wash 'n Wear Drip-Dry sport shirts

1 Drip-Dry white dress shirt

1 pair dress shoes

1 pair canvas shoes

1 light bathrobe

2 pair of nylon or dacron pajamas

1 tweed sports jacket

1 pair of heavy slacks

1 pair of chino slacks

1 summer suit

1 raincoat 

2 neckties

1 bathing suit

toilet and shaving articles (adapted for European use, if electric)

Don't take another thing!

Of course, to the modern reader, this still seems like an absurdly long list. Two suits? A bathrobe? Even if you take care to be a bit more formal than the average tourist, you're still probably packing fewer garments and of lighter material.

One final, amusing thing to note: Hope also suggests that you "roll into scroll-like shapes whatever is rollable: underwear, slips, bras, and so forth--all the things that don't have to be wrinkle-free. In that manner, these items can be placed along the sides of your suitcase easily, or into the most unusual cracks and crevices (you'll discover plenty of them while packing)."

Does that sound at all familiar? If you travel at all or read any travel-related web sites or publications, you've probably heard this before, always presented as a modern innovation. A mere two months ago, the New York Times breathlessly reported that "many flight attendants roll their clothes rather than fold them to save space."

Yeah, well. E5D got there first. Again.

For more on packing, innovative or otherwise, check out these past posts:


What's in my backpack?
The burdens of baggage

In defense of the beaten path

In the wake of my appearance on CBC Radio's Q, I've started to realize that some people have me pegged as "the guy who defends tourists." While there's some truth to that, and while I don't mind playing that role to a certain degree, I want to be clear that I don't think that tourism is inherently good. Or, for that matter, inherently bad. Read any random sample of this blog and you'll see that I have incredibly mixed feelings about tourism, tourists, and the effects thereof.

Having said that, allow me to now, yes, defend the beaten path in three ways. (Basically, these are the talking points I wish I'd raised, or elaborated upon, during my interview.)

1. You meet some interesting people in the Tourist Culture
As discussed previously, there's a distinct Tourist Culture, with its own dress code (khaki travel pants, sensible shoes), its own literature (guidebooks, obviously), its own cuisine (the Irish Pub), its own rituals ("Scusi, could you, por favor, mein camera ... take foto? Merci bonjour?").  The Tourist Culture includes people from all over the world, which means that you may well encounter a family from India while traveling in Finland (over 50,000 Indian tourists go there every year) or a few of the two million Chinese who visit Europe annually, or the diverse group Lee and I met on our beer tour in Munich, which included dedicated drinkers history buffs from Japan, South Africa, England, Argentina, and the US. In Berlin, also during a tour, we met a young guy from Malaysia who had been working in London and was heading back to Malaysia, by way of his own long-planned, much-saved-for Grand Tour.

These are the types of people you meet in the Tourist Culture: interesting people from all over the world.

Truth is, you're not going to just parachute into another culture and fit right in with the locals, no matter how hard you try, no matter how carefully you plan your attire or try to study the language. You're an outsider. That will be obvious to them. And no matter how eager you are to interact with them, they probably don't want to interact with you--they just want to go about their daily lives, danke, and not be bothered by this stranger who's come to stare at them and mangle their language and ask to see how the Authentic Local Thing is done. No, it's the other people like you, the other outsiders, who are most likely to strike up conversation with you. You're a kindred spirit. And, truly, you'll find that a lot of those people are--like you--actually pretty damn interesting and, gosh, not the clichéd shallow, tacky tourists of stereotype.

So, no, you probably won't meet a lot of hobbled, cloaked-in-oh-so-native-garb grandmotherly types if you stay on the beaten path. You won't encounter many of the eccentric characters who populate the year-in-a-remote-village memoirs that have become such a cliche of travel writing. And, sure, fine: it's a shame that you won't meet those Authentic Individuals™. But you will meet all kinds of other people who will be more than worth your while. And maybe, just maybe, you'll become friends and keep in touch, and they'll invite you to visit them in their homeland--allowing you to get off the beaten path and get a local's perspective, precisely because you didn't do that last time around.

2. Travel is not about bragging rights
There's a prominent travel blogger who says he's a "one-man National Geographic." There are lots of other travel bloggers and writers and just-plain-travelers who boast of how many countries they've visited, like there's some kind of lifetime merit badge that they're trying to earn.

What's the point of such boasts, though?  At their base, aren't they just statements of status and privilege and an admission of a myopic, self-absorbed worldview that mistakes accumulation of passport stamps for open-mindedness and intelligence? Is this not like the kids in high school who thought their entire self-worth was dependent on how many decals were on their letter jackets?

I don't know how many countries I've visited. Sure, I could figure it out. But I just don't care. I don't travel so that I can place-drop in conversation. Similarly, I don't seek out the lowest-price hostel--or, for that matter, the highest-price hotel. I look for--wait for it--the place that best fits my own personal needs in terms of budget, safety, and location (meaning, of course, proximity to a bakery). Which, by the way, might change on a day-to-day basis--some days, I want to save money and don't mind a bit of discomfort; others, I desperately need a hot shower and a good night's sleep on clean sheets.

Travel seems to have become a status marker of sorts, with specific travel attitudes and methodologies as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. It's a chance to show the rest of the world--or at least blog readers and Facebook friends--what kind of person said traveler wants to be.  That, to me, is absurd. (Um, pay no attention to the fact that you're reading this on a blog by a person who would love for you to think of him as at least mildly witty and semi-intelligent. Pay. No. Attention.)

It's absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, hewing only to the instructions of  the latest Fodor's. It's equally absurd when it means avoiding any cities or landmarks for the specific reason that they're popular. (Most absurd of all, though, is anyone who uses The 1,000 Places To Go Before You Die as dogma.) Seriously, I thought we all learned this by the time we were teenagers: sometimes the crowds are right, sometimes they're wrong--you have to find your own path, and that's going to be a mix of the popular and the unpopular.

Travel is not about bragging rights. It's about exploring, learning, and trying to understand the new. It's about enjoying the bounty of weirdness and wonderfulness of the planet--some of which just happens to be located on the beaten path.

3. The beaten path is already beaten. So don't go beating more paths. 
There's also the argument--which I made on Q--that following the tourist trail is the truest eco-tourism, the greenest and most ethical option, because those places already overrun and McDonaldized and otherwise ruined. You're staying on the sidewalk, not trampling the fragile flowers of the untouched, untouristed places. I'm not sure I'm convinced of my own argument here, actually (feel free to argue pro/con in the comments). I don't want it to be true--that would kind of break my heart. But I fear that it just might be absolutely correct.

Always the other chap: notes on tourists

1. I AM, YOU ARE, WE ARE TOURISTS
Tourist or traveler: Which are you? Actually, don't answer that. Because to be perfectly honest, I don't care. I'm sick of this conversation. It's the travel equivalent of debating the work of Sartre and Heidegger and Kierkegaard: boring, pretentious, obnoxious. Who am I, fundamentally? Am I intrinsically good? Evil? Do I have any real autonomy, or am I just like Neo in "The Matrix," a body stuck in a virtual world? In the words of Keanu, or maybe Plato, Whoa.

Talking about such matters at length--either existentialism or the traveler/tourist dichotomy--only makes you sound like a pretentious wanker, no matter what your stance.

I pretty much agree with Eric Weiner, who calls out the "I'm a traveler, not a tourist" crowd in a new essay on World Hum, "Why Tourism is Not a Four-Letter Word":

Travel snobbery is rampant, insidious, and, frankly, annoying. Everyone fancies themselves a traveler, not a tourist. But that’s a lie. The fact is we’re all tourists. Yes, even you, travel snob. Now get over it. 

But I also know that Evelyn Waugh definitively covered this territory in the 1920s, with his immortal quip, "The tourist is always the other chap." And to me, there's not much else anyone can say. End of the conversation. We're all tourists.

So, yes, I trust we can all agree: Clearly, tourism can help destroy a culture. Clearly it can help preserve it, or at least an exaggerated, theme park version of it, as Weiner points out, and as I noted in my post about Munich. (UPDATE: for a compelling, convincing commentary on the culture-"preserving" effects of tourism, check out this essay on Matador by Sarah Menkedick.) Tourism and travel are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, and the debate is unresolvable ... so, lordy, enough already. Can we please just move on and all agree to stop this silly philosophical conversation about terminology? Travel well. Keep an open mind. Respect other cultures. Don't be a jackass or an imperialist. End of discussion. Thanks and good night.


2. NEUROTIC INTERLUDE
Except . . . even after I've said that, even as I realize that this post should end right there, even as I realize that any editor who reads this will instinctively reach for the red pen to cross out everything that follows . . . I can't resist adding further commentary, because as aggravating as I find this conversation, it's also irresistible.


3. A TALE OF TWO GUIDEBOOKS
I need to point something out. You know who isn't afraid of the term "tourist"? Arthur Frommer. Here's how he opens Europe on Five Dollars a Day:

This is a book for American tourists who
a) own no oil wells in Texas
b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan
c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas
and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.

Hard to imagine that first line in Lonely Planet. Even harder to imagine in a modern guidebook is this blurb, from Travel Magazine, printed on the back of E5D: “The mere possession of EUROPE ON $5 A DAY must become the conspicuous mark of a traveling American from now on.”

Conspicuous mark?  Actually, that doesn’t sound like a selling point at all, at least not to the modern reader.  To the twenty-first century traveler, the blurb basically translates to, “Buy this book and you’ll stand out like the stereotypical Ugly American tourist you are, you sad, pathetic loser.”

I find it fascinating that even though E5D came out in 1957, decades after Evelyn Waugh's brilliant quip, Frommer could still use the term "tourist" without shame or irony. When I asked my mom about the subject recently, she laughed and said, of her 1967 Grand Tour, "Of course we were tourists!"

In 1967, one went to Europe purely for the sake of going to Europe. There was no shame in that. Today it seems necessary to have some deeper motivation--to find one's roots, to learn to make authentic Tuscan peasant cuisine, to escape the rat race and live the good life in Provence. Otherwise, prepare for scorn. To tell your friends that you want to see the Eiffel Tower, the canals of Venice, the Running of the Bulls, and other icons of European tourism is to invite scowls, wrinkled noses, long pauses in the conversation, and tentative questions of "You're ... you're kidding, right?" Example: a friend of mine, upon hearing that I was going to Paris, informed me that I should try to go the whole five days without ever seeing the Eiffel Tower, even for a moment, even as speck on the horizon. In fact, in certain quarters, you're deemed an Ugly American if you head to Paris rather than spending your trip trekking through the Alps, herding goats and learning to make artisanal cheeses. (Actually, what are you doing in Europe at all? It's such a total cliche, you Western-centric prick! You should be trekking across Nepal or hanging with Maoist rebels in some war-torn republic.) But when Arthur Frommer penned Europe on Five Dollars a Day in 1957, simply seeing the continent, even the already-overrun landmarks, was still something of a bold excursion into the unknown.

In the fifty years since then, tourism has become a dirty word. Take the blurb on the back of a more recent guidebook, a 2006 edition of Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door (whose very title is loaded with "traveler-not-tourist" smugness): “Avoid crowds and tourist traps. ... Discover off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”

(But let me once again offer translation services. That quote actually means, "This incredibly popular guidebook, trusted by millions, will lead you to places that no outsider has seen before, certainly not those millions of others who have this guidebook." That's just objectively false.  It's sort of the inverse of the famous Yogi Berra line "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"--by following the advice of guidebooks, everyone goes to the same out-of-the-way place precisely because no one goes there.)

So, yes, something changed between Frommer's first edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and now.  Back then, travel was still inherently adventurous--even if you were traveling what's now considered the beaten path. Now? Well, here's proof of how much of a cliche travel abroad has become: when the blog Stuff White People Like began its eponymous inventory, Traveling came in at number nineteen on the list, fittingly sandwiched between "Awareness" and "Being an expert on YOUR culture," and beating out such uber-white things as Apple products, public radio, and microbreweries.

White person travelling can be broken into two categories – First World and Third World.

First world is Europe and Japan, and man, this travel is not only beloved but absolutely essential in their development as white people.

Every white person takes at least one trip to Europe between the ages of 17-29. During this time they are likely to wear a back pack, stay at a hostel, meet someone from Ireland/Sweden/Italy with whom they have a memorable experience, get drunk, see some old churches and ride a train.

What’s amazing is that all white people have pretty much the same experience, but all of them believe theirs to be the first of its kind.

Guilty as charged.


4. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...

Finally, for the two of you still reading, I'd like to offer the following Tourism Primer, just so you can see how old this conversation is (and therefore why it's implicitly unresolvable, and therefore we should just kill it already).

Tourism as we know it today traces its roots to the concept of the Grand Tour, beginning with 17th-century British aristocrats who journeyed to the continent ostensibly as something of an informal but dignified academic exercise, but often involving a certain level of timeless tourist debauchery—heavy drinking, sexual escapades, barroom brawls. Think of it as Ye Olde Spring Break. According to Tim Moore’s The Grand Tour—in which Moore follows in the footsteps of the original Grand Tourist, the amusingly crass and eternally unlucky Thomas Coryarte—there were some 40,000 Englishmen on the continent in 1786. In 1851, Thomas Cook initiated the package tour, leading a group from Leicester, England to the Paris Exhibition.

The term “tourist” dates to the late 18th century. The pejorative usage followed shortly thereafter, with Francis Kilvert grousing, in the 1870s, “of all the noxious animals, the most noxious is the tourist.” John Muir complained about day-trippers ruining Yosemite; Thoreau griped about the excessive visitors to Walden Pond; in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain mocked -- well, pretty much everyone, actually, but he had particularly harsh comments about his fellow foreign travelers.

In fact, complaints about places being overrun with visitors undoubtedly go back to the Stone Age, when, one fateful day, Og and Rrr were relaxing by their fire and a crowd of strangers barged in--presumably wearing cargo shorts fashioned from tiger hides, colorful headgear emblazoned with tacky insignias, and massive rocks on strings around their necks, in anticipation of the invention of the camera--and demanded to see the cave paintings they'd heard so much about. Turning to Rrr, Og let out a series of grunts that roughly translated to, "If it's tourist season, why can't I spear them?"

I jest, but it's actually well-documented that the ancient Romans exhibited the stereotypical boorish behavior of today's tourists. What was the Colosseum, if not a seriously old-school sports stadium--meaning tourist attraction? Nero, infamous emperor of fiddling-in-a-fire fame, had a freaking theme restaurant. Roman travelers bought trinkets and had their own tourist trail, their own sandal-beaten path, as Tony Perrottet documents in his book Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (there's that word again):

As [Perrottet] retraced the historic route, fighting the crowds and reading two-thousand-year-old descriptions of bad food, inadequate accommodations and pushy tour guides, it became clear that tourism has actually changed very little since Caesar's day.

So. Tourism. Ancient stuff. Complaining about it: also ancient. Complaining about the complainers: well, probably not that much more recent.

Goodbye, info overload; hello, willful ignorance

Willful ignorance: the new hot trend in travel? If so, I'd like to think I was on the cutting edge.

The January issue of Travel + Leisure features an excellent essay by Peter Jon Lindberg about the benefits and pitfalls of using social networking while traveling. There's lots to like, he notes, including the fact that we can find out pretty much anything we want to know--"With minimal effort, in the comfort of a hotel lobby, I can plot a route to a restaurant I’m considering, download tonight’s menu, translate it instantly from the Catalan, read 47 detailed customer reviews, call up TwitPics of the razor clams, even take some guy’s virtual tour of the dining room."

But Lindberg concludes, as many of us (travelers and otherwise) have, that maybe technology is robbing us of some of the joy, serendipity, and human interaction that are rather key, if intangible, components of a happy life.

Part of the thrill of travel is in the mystery it entails, the buzz that comes from trying to imagine what this strange new place will even look like. The gap between our expectations and harsh reality is diminishing, but so, too, I can’t help but think, is our excitement.

It’s true that information-age tools enable us to have easier, safer, more reliable vacations. But sometimes we have better vacations in spite of them. The danger is in using these conveniences simply because we can. Especially when we travel—which, after all, is supposed to entail stepping outside of ourselves and our little mobile cubicles. Take a look around you right now and count the number of people on the phone; I’ll bet they outnumber those who aren’t. The more we connect with the world above and beyond us, the harder it is to be present wherever we actually are.

I really don't think this point can be overstated. In fact, it's one of the main reasons for the nutty project documented in this blog. Using an outdated guidebook might be an extreme (perhaps even borderline ridiculous/stupid) reaction to information overload, but, well, that was the point: to be a bit extreme, to fight back and show that willful ignorance can have its benefits.

(And if you're new to this blog, this would be a great time to read the FAQs or to hop over to World Hum and watch the two-minute audio slideshow about my willfully-ignorant, information-underloaded experiences in Paris.)

Trying really hard to like Venice

Your mental image of Venice, like everyone else's, is probably precisely the sort of scene that Arthur paints in his opening paragraph of the Venice chapter:

Venice is a fantastic dream. To feel its full impact, try to arrive at night, when the wonders of the city can steal upon you, piecemeal and slow. At the foot of the Venice railway station, there is a landing from which a city launch embarks for the trip up the Grand Canal. As you chug along, little clusters of candy-striped mooring poles emerge from the dark; a gondola approaches with a lighted lantern hung from its prow; the reflection of a slate-gray church, bathed in a blue spotlight, shimmers in the water as you pass by.

Lyrical, no? Evocative, enchanting, etc. Much more captivating writing than you'll find in most modern guidebooks. Well, I'm here to tell you that it is--or at least has become--false advertising. This place kinda sucks. Oh, I know what you're thinking: I would love to be in Venice right now. I would sell body parts to be in Venice.  My spleen, for example. And this guy is going to complain about being there, in the charm capital of the world?

That's right.

Oh, it's nice enough, I suppose. The canals are heartbreakingly lovely and pictureseque. . . . For approximately six hours and forty-three minutes. And then, in an instant, you're over them. They suddenly become mere nuisances, obstacles blocking your path, forcing you to walk two miles instead of twenty feet, when all you want to do is go to that restaurant RIGHT OVER THERE, FOR GOODNESS SAKE.

Thing is, Venice is a one-trick town. To be sure, it's a hell of a trick. One of the best in the world, as tricks go. But really: six hours and forty-three minutes. I defy you to remain interested longer than that.

Part of the problem is that you can't actually walk along most of the canals. You walk across them and then back into the graffiti-strewn labyrinth of waterless, narrow streets. You can peer down them and take a gazillion postcard-worthy photos of the sun-dappled, charmingly-deteriorated buildings on either side. But you actually get kind of tired of the beauty, immune to it.

Amsterdam: now those were some captivating canals. They were wide enough that you could actually appreciate the scene across the way. The houseboats added a level of layering and visual interest that Venice lacks. There was some breathing room. And though they were plentiful, the canals weren't freaking everywhere, like they are here. They were the spots of calm and respite, all the more enchanting because of the contrast to the rest of the city. Here, in Venice, they are the city.

Also, Amsterdam, though crowded, had its quiet spots, areas where you could be reasonably certain that if you coralled the next passerby, he or she would not be a tourist. Here, they (okay, WE) are a constant, crowded presence. I can't even imagine what it must have been like a month ago, in the high season. You probably couldn't walk more than three feet in an hour. Note to self: if you must go to Venice in August, pack a snorkel so that you can swim to your destination. 

In Amsterdam, you also could be fairly confident that if you went into a given restaurant, you would not immediately be handed a piece of paper reading "tourist menu" and listing exhorbitant prices for manifestly inferior food.

Not so here. I might go through my entire supply of Pepto-Bismol tablets. Every restaurant has the same menu, a sort of greatest-hits-of-Italy, with the So-So Seafood on page one and the Pedestrian Pizza at the back. I spent a lot of time looking at menus today--all for purposes of research; all for you, dear reader. There were variations in price but, two Chinese restaurants aside, the offerings were entirely uniform. From my quick glances at various diners' plates, I have to say the general quality looked middling at best. Below Olive Garden-level.

This evening, I went to a restaurant recommended by Arthur. You'd think that if it's been open for at least forty-some years, they're probably doing something right and the food's probably fairly authentic and semi-tasty. But my lasagne bore the distinctive pockmarks of microwave reheating. They didn't even bother to remove it from the Lexan glass bowl before serving it. As for the roast chicken, I strongly suspect it was neither roast nor chicken but one of the semi-domesticated pigeons from the Piazza San Marco, boiled in fetid canal water.

Even the gondolas have let me down. Recall that evocative paragraph from Arthur.

I made a truly valiant effort to like this place: I spent an hour or so this evening looking for an after-dark gondola, confident that the mere sight would change my mind (and also hopeful at that same moment, a ravishing, mysterious contessa would emerge from the shadows like a stealth siren, taking me by the hand and leading me into said gondola, which would take us to her opulent villa, etc., etc.).

But I did not see a single gondola after dark. Not with a lantern or otherwise. Not by the Rialto Bridge, not by the bridge by the train station, not in the big gondola-gathering spot by the Hard Rock Cafe. Niente.

What I did see--or rather, hear--was a party boat. It passed by just outside my window a few moments ago--and the canal my apartment overlooks is about 15-20 feet wide, so when I say "just outside," I mean that I could have reached out and smacked one of the boaters.

I'm wishing I had, actually, because now they're going back in the other direction, and they're singing--ruining--one of my favorite songs. "Volare." Gipsy Kings.

I love that song. Or rather, I did until a few seconds ago. I listed it as my number one travel song of all time in the World Hum poll last year. It's soaring, it's hummable, it makes whatever you're doing seem epic and triumphant--wash the dishes to it and you'll start to think you're saving the world with each scrub.

But now they've ruined it for me. Forget triumph: "Volare" will forever conjure memories of drunken boaters singing off-key. They don't all know all the lyrics, so they just kind of yell roughly in time to the music until it gets to the chorus, at which point they all burst out--and I want you to imagine a boat load of Venetian frat boy types, plastered on cheap Chianti, on a boat in a narrow canal flanked by an echo chamber of brick buildings, singing at the top of their lungs--"Voooooo-laaare!"

"O Sole Mio" it ain't.

Charm capital of the world, this place. Get me out of here.

--------
Note: I wrote this my second (?) night in Venice, by which point the city's charms had worn off. I didn't post it because I thought it was too mean and figured I'd change my mind. Nope. Not really. Those jaded American students I met were right: it's like a theme park, with all the tourists and crappy, expensive food you'd expect in such a place.

Notes on language

(1) From Arthur:

The most famous last words of the American tourist are: "They speak English everywhere."

Well, they don't. You can, with luck, be stranded in a European town among people who will simply shrug their shoulders to an English-uttered request.

(2) That's still true, but if you go to pretty much any restaurant, snack bar, or souvenir shop in a tourist area, and it's a good bet that all of the employees know enough English to communicate with you. Even at, say, McDonald's (where I don't spend money but do--God bless America--use the free bathrooms). If the employees are immigrants--and as in the US, many service industry workers are from other places--then they're at least tri-lingual: native language, language of country they've moved to, English.

(3) Many panhandlers in tourist areas are also at least bilingual. Ditto street performers.

(4) In other words, nearly all tourist-area fast food employees, and a large portion of the street performers and panhandlers, know more languages than most college graduates in the US.

(5) At the EU headquarters in Brussels, we learned that there are 23 official EU languages (for 27 countries); all documents and proceedings have to be translated into each. But they do not always go straight from A to B--not a lot of people who can speak both Greek and Finnish, or Latvian and Irish. Instead, they have "relay" languages, meaning, for example, the Greek speech is translated into English, French, and Spanish, and then the Finnish translator takes it from there. This makes sense, of course, but it must lead to a fair amount of confusion and mistranslation. Every additional step gives room for more error.

(6) According to the EU, 28 percent of Europeans know two other languages in addition to their mother tongue. As a second language, English is the most-spoken, with 38 percent (of non-native European English speakers) knowing enough to carry on a conversation. Fourteen percent speak conversational German or French as a second language.

(7) English is, therefore, Europe's everyday relay language. All the European tourists talk to the European locals in English.

(8) On the train from Venice to Rome, four backpackers seated near me were passing around a little electronic translator, having a conversation in German, Italian, and English. Very slowly. But it seemed to work.

(9) American pop culture is a big resource for English learners abroad. In Denmark, I watched some basketball players--big, blond, Nordic guys. They spoke only in Danish except for the phrases "shoooot!," "three!," "FUCK!," "on fire," and, alas (and I'm not making this up), "yeeeeah, n*gga!!"

(10) It's always clear when menus and exhibit text and such have been translated using the internet, not a real person. Favorite example: at Ciro Pizza in Rome, the Caprese Salad is translated as "Capricious Salad." Don't order that.

(11) The annual European Day of Languages is tomorrow (September 26).

(12) I am in Madrid, where I kind of sort of speak the language. It's like I have water in my ears--I can discern most words, but it's all kind of garbled. Still, that's a step up from all the other places I've been in the last five-plus weeks. One problem, though, is that while my vocabulary is limited, my accent is pretty good, so after I say my initial question or greeting, everyone assumes I speak fluently. At which point they start talking at roughly 2,500 words per minute and my comprehension drops to zero.

Greatest hits

I know you're busy.

I know I write long posts that sometimes take the scenic route to get to the point (but there always is one!).

And I know, or at least strongly suspect, that there are some new readers out there who don't really want to slog through everything, who'd prefer to skip to the good stuff.

I'd rather have you read a few full posts than skim them all.

So to make your life easier, dear impatient reader, I'm adding to the sidebar a list of my favorite posts, the "keepers" that I think are particularly insightful, interesting, or otherwise noteworthy.

Obviously, start with the FAQ
Getting sloshed with celebrities
Anne Frank House (Amsterdam)
Berlin's split personality
The frustrations of European trains
How tourism will save the world (sort of)
Discovering the path no longer beaten in Munich
On becoming a more confident traveler
Going native in the tourist culture
Willful ignorance: the next hot travel trend?
... And finally, be sure to visit the gallery of Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Landmarks

Going native in the Tourist Culture

Tiny confession: That first night in Vienna, when I was feeling exhausted and coming down with a cold, and headed out into the city in hopes that Discovery and Childlike Wonder At Each New Sight and Spirit of Adventure would be my cure . . . I did not go to an authentic Austrian restaurant, as Arthur would have wanted. I did not discover at that moment that I love Germanic food but just haven't been giving it a shot.

That would be overdetermined and overdramatic and completely false.

Oh, I put in the effort. I examined the menus at several such restaurants and realized that in spite of the personal growth and growing confidence, Germanic food still scares the jeebers out of me. Culinarily speaking, I'm still a coward.

Instead, I opted to go native for the Tourist Culture. Yeah, Tourist Culture--there is one. It's a diverse society that encompasses people of all ethnicities, but only when they're away from home. They--er, we--go to the same places (Eiffel Tower, Venice), eat the same foods (kebabs, pizza), have the same rituals ("Scusi, could you ... photo, me, take? Por favor?"), the same native dress (cargo shorts, walking shoes).

It is indeed a unique culture, but one to which we belong only temporarily. It's a culture of transience and halfway points, located somewhere between our actual, native cultures and those in which we have booked ourselves for a stay and a look-see.

So I went to the Tourist Culture native hang-out: an Irish Pub (run by guys from England).

Much has been written elsewhere about the rise of the Irish pub around the world. World Hum had a great summary when it included the pubs among its signs of a Shrinking Planet; read it here. See also this Slate article about the company responsible for the phenomenon.  It's called--wait for it--the Irish Pub Company, and it's as formulaic as McDonald's. When I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen, the first restaurant I saw was a place called O'Leary's. I've seen more in every city. They really are everywhere.

For my dinner, I ordered, from the English bartender in that Irish pub in Vienna, the most authentic of German--er, Irish--er, Tourist Culture meals: nachos. It seemed appropriate.

They weren't very good. Which also seemed appropriate.

Figuring it out: the personal journey

I noticed a few days ago that I've become a more confident traveler. Zurich was a tipping point.

Three weeks ago, in Copenhagen, I didn't eat a single meal in a restaurant; it was all either take-out or street food. Dining alone kind of frightened me. If I'd found a Frommer-recommended place that was still open (which I didn’t, aside from the really expensive one in the Tivoli Gardens), I would have gone in and eaten alone, miserably, pretending to write or read the whole time, dreading contact with the server.

That's basically what happened last year in Florence and Paris. If not for Arthur and this project, I probably would have survived on gelato in Italy and crepes in France. But you have to eat, and when you play by certain oddball rules, you have to put yourself out of your comfort zone and eat in historic restaurants with sometimes-historic, sometimes-grouchy employees. Eventually, inevitably, you learn that the waiters and bartenders can be interesting people, certainly more interesting than the company of pigeons in the park or Eurovision on television. Even introverts need to socialize. Sometimes it just takes a bit—okay, a lot—of effort. I started to learn that lesson last year, but the trip was short enough that I never fully adjusted.

In Copenhagen, I was still greeting each new day with trepidation, rather hoping that my efforts to find restaurants and sights Arthur recommends (to coin a verb, my “Frommering” efforts) would be unsuccessful so that I could retreat to a quiet park with a bag of pastries.

Of course, a major point of this project, or at least the self-centered point of it, is indeed to get out of my comfort zone and embark on a Personal Journey--to become smarter, savvier, suaver, sophisticated-er, sweeter-smelling, etc. Enlightenment and Self-Improvement and all that treacle. The profound epiphanies are still in short supply--and I'm okay with that; I was pretty happy with life beforehand, thanks very much. (And believe me, if I do figure out the Meaning of Life, I’ll let you know.)

In the abstract, though, in some ineffable way, I have become savvier, more confident, more competent. Certainly in terms of travel.

The change has come in part from the simple act of getting used to life on the road, life in an ever-changing, ever-unfamiliar environment. When you have to figure things out the hard way over and over, day after day, eventually even the hard way becomes slightly easier. You start to learn just enough words to get by, the rhythms of life, the subway systems, all the little markers of becoming at ease with a place . . . and, by extension, yourself.

Much of the credit, though, goes directly to Lee. Before he got here, I never set foot in a bar (on this trip, I mean), and it never would have occurred to me to sit at the bar and talk to the bartender. Our second night together, in Amsterdam, Lee did a shot of some exotic alcohol that was green and evil-looking and, according to the ads posted all over the bar, extremely potent. I looked on squeamishly, nursing my Heineken--the one drink I had that night, I believe--and worrying that, this being Amsterdam and all, someone might slip roofies into my beer, take my passport, and dump me into a canal.

By our last night together, in Zurich, I was demanding to Lee that we go bar-hopping. In one spot, I noticed on the shelf a bottle of Havana Club rum, a liquor that Lee, a bartender when not a sidekick, had never seen before. I presumed it was illegal in the States (Havana means Cuba means embargo), which made it all the more appealing. I informed Lee, in no uncertain terms, that we were doing shots. People who know me just did a double-take when reading that sentence, so perhaps I should confirm: that's correct, I ordered semi-illicit shots of alcohol. With glee.

I'd never ordered a shot in a bar--not Europe, not in the US. It's just not something that would have every occurred to me, to be honest. I'm happy to report that it was delicious: smooth with a nice little kick. A great complement to the various . . . actually, I'm not going to finish that sentence, for fear that you'll think I've become a huge lush. I have not. Promise. I have no desire to be like those women we met in Amsterdam, the ones who traveled specifically to get hammered.

I'm not sure everyone would see an uptick in bar-hopping as progress on my part, but believe me, it is. Or rather, it's a sign of progress, a symptom of it. I'm going out more and over-analyzing less. I've loosened up . . . a bit. Don't worry, I'm still charmingly neurotic and endearingly awkward and amusingly paranoid. There's still plenty where that came from. But the fears are a bit less absurd and a bit more fleeting, and they're tempered by some newfound confidence, a confidence whose very presence I frankly find amusing and astonishing. I have greater faith that things will work out in the end and, more to the point, in my own ability to make that happen.

Thank you, Lee, thank you, Arthur, for guiding me to this point:

Yesterday (Monday), after less than 24 hours in Vienna, I felt like I knew how to navigate the city, not just geographically but culturally. I'd already adjusted, at least to a large degree. I can't tell you how many times I had an internal dialog that went like this:

"Okay, so take the U3 three stops, then look for the big church, take a left, walk three blocks, go over the canal, and the place will be just past the park, on the right."

"Shouldn't you check the map a few more times? Or at least keep it out?"

"Nope. Not necessary."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing? Really?"

"As a matter of fact . . . yes."

"Oh. Well . . . all right, then. Carry on."

Of course, I also had the following thought, as my tram was going past the glorious neo-Classical parliament building, with its grand columns and statues of noblemen on horses: "Man, I have seen this building so many times in Europe. All these damn cities look the same! I am so over columns and horse statues."

So maybe I'm coming down with a minor case of Grand Tour Fatigue Syndrome, too, which is not exactly good news. . . .

The neighborhood that tourists forgot

Arthur divides the entertainment section of the Munich chapter into three sections: "for dancing," "for Bohemianism," and "for theatre."

The dance hall, which Arthur recommends "for shy bachelors," was closed, alas--it's now a furniture store. The bar next door, though, offered something for shy bachelors of a type the "girl-watching"-obsessed Mr. Frommer probably didn't have in mind. It's a bondage bar. I'm sure it would have been a cultural experience in all kinds of ways ... but I decided to give it a pass and move on to see what the Bohemians were up to.

These spots were all clustered in the northern part of town, away from the tourist center. The neighborhood is called Schwabing, and Arthur describes it as "the Greenwich Village are a of Munich ... in some respects, it's zanier and more colorful than anything New York offers."

I'll have to research this further, but my hunch is that post-E5D, Schwabing became a bit touristy. It's near the university--always a draw for young travelers--and about a 20 minute walk from the town center. And if Arthur sent the tourists there, they probably went.

Now, though, Schwabing is that rarest of finds: the place that was likely more touristy in Arthur's day, relative to other parts of the city, than it is today. I walked for blocks and blocks, on side streets and the main drag, and didn't hear English spoken once. There were bistros and hip record stores, guys on skateboards, teenagers doing parkour stunts in a plaza by the U-bahn station, and a cluster of old men playing chess on a massive board, with three-foot-high pieces, in an agreeably overgrown park. No t-shirt stores. No guitarists mangling pop songs in hopes of a few tips. It was utterly beguiling.

On Occam Strasse, I searched for restaurants Arthur recommends, and found none. But the street and the neighborhood were just as he'd promised: quiet, funky, hip, Greenwich Village-like.

I sat on a bench in a lush pocket park and pondered how it is that Schwabing retained--or reclaimed--its charm since the 1960s, avoiding being overrun with tourists and the attendant kitsch. I think I figured it out.

One word, a word that is major tourist bait: Oktoberfest.

Maybe you've heard of it. Little festival involving beer and drinking songs and men in lederhosen and women in drindls and beer and pretzels and schnitzel. And beer. As mentioned in the last post, this is why people come to Munich: for beer with a history chaser.

We'll be missing it by a few days, but the shops are filled with t-shirts and beer steins; the beer gardens and roller coasters (!) are being set up a few blocks from our hostel; the air is filled with the buzz of frantic preparation. They get six to seven million tourists every year for this thing. It's huge.

My theory is that Oktoberfest has permanently shifted Munich's tourism center of gravity to the areas around the train station and just to the south.

Oktoberfest started in 1818, so I know it was going on in the 1950s, but Arthur doesn't mention it. My guess (which I'll have to fact-check) is that it just wasn't a touristy thing back then. Probably only locals, or at least only Germans. At some point in the last 45-plus years, though, foreigners started deciding that passing out in gutters was a fun thing to do in one's leisure time, and Oktoberfest became what it is today: Germany by way of Disney by way of Vegas.

Tourists now stick to the south part of town, where there's plenty of beer to keep them occupied. Schwabing remains, or has become again, a placid-but-funky neighborhood.

So thank you, Arthur, for leading me away from the crowds. That's exactly the sort of unexpected delight that I hoped to find by using your outdated information.

How tourism will save the world (sort of)

Eighty-five percent of Munich was destroyed during WWII, but the city still looks old, full of imposing Gothic buildings. How is that possible? Because they rebuilt it to appear pretty much as it had before the way. It's fake historic architecture.

And why would you do that? Tourists. You don't go to Munich to gamble or to sit in the sun, you go to Munich to pretend to appreciate German culture, or at least their beer. You go to sit in massive historic (or faux-historic) beer halls. You go because here you can get drunk and call it a culturally authentic, history-enriched experience.

Yes, there were other reasons to re-build the city as it was--pride, for one. But according to our tour guide, tourism was indeed a major factor.

A lot of the historic sites and restaurants here seem to serve tourists almost exclusively. For starters, there's no way the ridiculous Glockenspiel in City Hall would still be here if tourists didn't love the crazy thing.

So tourists help preserve history and culture! Hooray for tourists! We're saving the world!

... Or maybe not. Obviously, tourism often promotes a particular variety of preservation, an exaggerated, theme park-ish one. Like a frog preserved with formaldehyde, it's kinda deformed and distorted (and foul-smelling). Superficially like the real thing, but not quite 100 percent authentic.

So here's a question for discussion:

Without tourists, would Munich beer halls be:

(A) replaced by modern office buildings or malls, or at least converted to sprawling department stores?
or
(B) packed, per tradition, with thousands of old men wearing lederhosen and singing drinking songs without the slightest trace of irony or snickering in their voices?

9:50 to Munich, via Kafka

First, a quick history lesson:

There are three main things that opened up European travel for the average American in the late 1950s: Europe on Five Dollars a Day, affordable plane tickets, and Eurail passes.

(There was also the evolving postwar psyche of optimism, freedom, and increasing amounts of leisure time. That's probably the most important piece of the puzzle, but it's a hell of a lot less tangible and I should probably not try to tackle it in a hastily-written blog post composed on a crowded train about to arrive in Munich.)

E5D came along in 1957, giving travelers an easy-to-follow recipe for travel. Jumbo jets and economy-class plane tickets began in 1959, along with the Eurail pass; these, of course, were the ingredients. Extending the cooking metaphor, the result was that European travel became as easy as pie.

One of the wonderful things about a Eurail pass is that you just step onto the trains. No additional ticket required. If you miss one, get the next. If you impulsively decide you'd like to stop in Nuremberg on your way to Munich, you can. Eurail tickets are sold by countries and days; as long as you stay within those constraints, you can take as many trains as you like. (I have a five-country pass for eight travel days, to be used in two months.) In some cases you need to make reservations for trains, but in most cases you don't.

And now, back to the present.

It's 9:45 this morning, and we step onto a train headed for Munich. Technically, Eurail passes are first-class tickets (livin' large, baby!), but we prefer to be with the Great Unwashed Masses--that is, the more interesting, less stuffy normal people. We choose a random second-class car, push our way through the scrum by the door, and take a couple of adjacent seats.

We soon discover that, in fact, some seats are reserved. For example, ours. Just as we get settled, a middle-aged man says something mildly stern to us in German. It could be "Pardon me, good sirs, you seem to be occupying the seats that I have reserved. I really don't mean to be a bother, but I'd be ever so grateful if you wouldn't mind finding another place to sit." But it wasn't that long, and certainly not that polite. More likely: "Scräm, türists." (Gratuitous umlauts are funny. You're going to have to put up with them until I'm out of Germany.)

We apologize and move. At the moment our rears hit the upholstery of our new seats, it happens again. You can't be here, you must go somewhere else! But in a language we don't speak.

This goes on for a good half-hour. It becomes mildly Kafkaesque. We pinball around the car, apologizing at every bounce. We hope that this will not continue for the entirety of the six-hour journey. We also wonder why these people keep appearing with reservations in hand, even though the train has been moving for a while. Where have they been all this time? Waiting for us to take their seats so that they can practice their comedic timing on these hapless, easily-flustered, oh-so-amusing Americans?

After an hour or so, the train starts going backwards. As in: opposite from the direction we want to travel. As in: What the hell? Did we really, actually joined the Kafka Day Tour? I don't recall signing up for such an excursion, but then again, given the nature of the thing, I suppose you wouldn't be given the option.

So this will be our fate: to travel the same expanse of countryside over and over, all day, all night, an endless loop. But on the train, nothing will repeat, nothing will be settled. We'll never sit in the same spot for more than a minute. For the rest of days, we will be bounced around a train to nowhere, a train called Tourism As Existential Crisis.

At one point, I find a table with three seats occupied; a fourth, on the aisle, is free. I take it. My table-mates are all reading German newspapers, which they have spread over the table, leaving no room for my laptop. All of my reading material is in my backpack, down on the other end of the train, where Lee is, presumably, guarding it with his life. What the hell am I going to do here for the next four or five hours?

I try sleeping, but I'm afraid of being awoken by a swift umbrella-slap to the face by an angry German. I try staring off into space, letting my mind wander, but a toddler starts glaring at me from across the aisle, annoyed at my apparent sloth and lack of German devotion to productivity. (The kid is creepy--he's glaring non-stop, with an utterly unsettling gaze, for a good five or ten minutes. I'm not lying. Very Children of the Corn.)

So I pull out my pocket-sized notebook; it will have to keep me busy. For four hours. With only eight blank pages left.

Well, you will be happy to know that I have put those pages--and a good ten whole minutes--to use composing a limerick for you:

There once was a man from Berlin
Who believed that to smile was to sin
At the sight of a tourist
He grew über-boorish
And growled, "Das est mein seat you're in!"

Of Checkpoints and Snackpoints

Berlin is an odd town, one that seems confused about and ill at ease with its history.

This is probably in part because it's also a new town--as our tour guide pointed out yesterday, the unified Berlin, sans wall, is still a teenager (it will turn 20 later this year). So it's still gawky and awkward, still testing new things, figuring out its identity, and growing, growing, growing.

Our tour started just inside the former East Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gates. At a Starbucks. Next to The Museum Kennedys.

The presence of these trappings of tourism didn't actually surprise me here, actually. It's a famous landmark; of course there's a museum and a Starbucks nearby.

But for some reason--naivete, I guess--I didn't expect pretty much all of what we saw in East Berlin to look essentially the same. Aside from a few scattered ugly, blocky apartment buildings, it looked exactly like West Berlin: same people, same landscape, same tourist restaurants and non-touristy bistros. If you were to drop me into a random Berlin neighborhood, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you if it were East or West. (And come to think of it, the West part of the city also has its share of regrettable architecture, so even those blocky apartment complexes might not be a tip-off.)

What was even more unexpected, though, was the close--close--proximity of memorials and tourist crap.

There are monuments all over: the Holocaust Memorial, with its haunting field of stone blocks of various sizes, orderly and yet chaotic; the sunken room full of empty shelves on the square where the Nazis burned books; the double rows of cobble stones that trace the line of the Berlin Wall, showing the seam where the nation was ripped apart and is slowly, even now, being sewn back together.

It seems like every few steps, there's a moving remembrance and you keep realizing you're in yet another place that you remember from your high school history class. But the minute you start to reflect on the awful things that happened here, you're distracted: t-shirts, ice cream, postcards coffee, get your photo taken in this American GI outfit, bus tours of the city--board here!
I realize that many historic places have tourist amenities and junk to buy. Even the Anne Frank House has a gift shop and a cafe. Here, though, it seems like every single block has both a monument and a Hard Rock Cafe, and the presence of the latter does rather diminish the somber nature of the former.

Case in point: Checkpoint Charlie. This used to be the main waystation between East and West Berlin. Arthur notes that it is actually quite simple for tourists to visit the East--the Wall is there to keep Easterners in, not others out. Of course, there's not much to see there, none of the wacky, wonderful nightclubs that Arthur raves about in West Berlin. But if you do want to cross the border, not problem: just "register your name with the American MPs at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time you plan to return, and if you're not there at that time, they'll take action."

(Let us pause for a moment of thanks that World War III was not begun over a missing American tourist, who simply got lost or was having too much fun in East Germany, and was late to return to the checkpoint.)

The checkpoint is still there. On one side of the street, there's a museum (Checkpoint Charlie Museum, naturally). I didn't go in, but it looks Serious and Informative.

Facing the museum, on the other side of the street, is Snackpoint Charlie, a food court with a Subway, a Chinese fast food stand, and other such establishments. (None of which, by the way, appears to offer cheesily-named foods like a Berlin Wall-dorf Salad or a U-Boat Sub. The kitsch level was disappointingly low.)

Between these centers of heartache and heartburn, in the median in the middle of the street, is a guard house. This is where the actually checkpoint was. It looks pretty realistic, if you can block out the tourists and free-flowing traffic. There's a wall of sandbags; there are two guys in 1960s-era military garb, one holding an American flag, the other bearing the Union Jack of Britain. A third, about twenty feet into East German territory, stands in a tiny hut with a laptop; in front of the hut is a tripod with a camera on top.

Get your photo with the Allied guards. Seven euros and up.

Just don't try to take your own photo of the soldiers. If you do, the American will snap at you in Russian-accented English.

A block away, in East German territory, a long fence along the sidewalk bears a series of signs with a detailed history of the Wall. There are photos, illustrations, and text in multiple languages; it's a moving testament to the tyranny this place has suffered. At the end of the line of signs, there's a new sign, a sandwich board blocking the sidewalk: Ben & Jerry's Sold Here. A few steps on, you can step into a souvenir shop with tacky t-shirts.

I can't express how common this scene is, or how jarring and dizzying. The city can't seem to decide whether it wants to dwell on the past or focus on the future. So it tries to do both. The attitude is "never forget, but don't spend too much time remembering, either."

Today Lee was looking at our map, trying to figure out our trip tomorrow to a former concentration camp. The map is a free one (Arthur's was not very useful, so we had to get a backup at the hotel reception desk); it was printed by a company that runs various tours, the starting points of which are noted on the map.

The pub crawl, for example, starts near the Oranienburger Strasse station. The concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, is at the end of the same train line, close to the Oranienburg station. You could easily do both tours in the same day, and given the tourist map's large ads for each, it seems like that's probably fairly common.

Head this way for the death camp; that way for the party. Or do both. I think that about sums up Berlin.

I still believe that tourists are really good at heart

[UPDATE: A slightly tweaked version of this essay appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2010. Click here to read that version.]

Frommer gives the Anne Frank House its own section, under the heading "The Unforgettable." He calls the effect of visiting "searing, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief"; he then adds, "Let none of us ever pass through Amsterdam without making a pilgrimage to the Anne Frank House."

But I’d seen the line—out the door, down the block. And I’d seen the tourists posing in front of the house with wide grins, casually leaning on the doorway like it was Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. No matter how serious the subject matter, the experience was bound to be rich with irony and cheesiness.

Lee and I joined the line just behind four British women in their early twenties. We watched them dig hungrily into their bag of potato chips and listened to their stories of drunkenness at various moments in their lives and, the preceding day, of getting stoned at one of the coffee shops here. It was, frankly, the precise type of vapid conversation you’d stereotypically expect of tourists of that age. One woman was particularly quick with the tales of debauchery. She had bleach-blonde hair, pulled into a ponytail with a small pink ribbon, and wore huge sunglasses, an astonishing amount of makeup, flip-flops and a tight black outfit that left little to the imagination. She was, in short, a tourist in all the stereotypical and pejorative meanings of the term.

So amusingly inane was the conversation that midway through our half-hour in line, I discreetly switched on my voice recorder. The topic switched to bad sushi, and the prevalence thereof in London and Amsterdam, then back to drunkenness. Lee and I exchanged looks of amusement and confusion.

"I bet there’ll be some precious comments inside the museum, too," Lee said.

I grinned. This was gonna be epic comedy.

Well . . . it wasn’t. Sure, the crowds were thick, and people said some silly things, like the woman cooing with delight at the bathroom in the hiding space—"Ooh, what a lovely toilet!" Yet even so, the house was so haunting, its story so jarring—even though I’d already heard it, knew it backwards and forwards—that all the snark drained from my body within a few minutes.

It was, as Frommer says, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief, even in spite of the crowds. There are quotes from Anne’s diaries on many of the walls in the lower part of the house, and they are of course lyrical and melancholy in equal measure. But once you climb the steep staircase beyond the famous bookshelf, you enter a place that just should not exist, that should not have to exist—and whose very existence tugs at your soul and makes you despair in some elemental way.

There were two things that struck me most. First was the section of wall, now covered in glass, on which the Frank family measured the growth of Anne and her sister, Margot. It’s such a mundane thing, which is what makes it so immediately identifiable—somehow, this detail can’t help but make you think of your own family, your own growth, your own youth. More disturbing, though, is your realization that they weren’t just in here for a few hours or a few weeks—there was enough time for the kids to grow, for the passing and loss of their youth to be documented inch by inch.

And then there was a line from Anne’s diary, dated December 24, 1943 and printed on the wall in the secret apartment: "I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free."

To read that quote in the midst of my own six-week, trans-continental journey—one that is, essentially, an expression of freedom and youth—is a jarring reminder that life is not always like this for everyone, not an endless stream of new discoveries and delights. For us tourists, the Anne Frank House is a destination to be checked off and posed in front of before we head on to the Heineken Experience or the Van Gogh Museum—it’s a place of fleeting interest in our journeys. We rarely pause to appreciate the fact that to see all these places is a luxury, that travel is a freedom not available to everyone. For Anne—and, more to the point, for way too many other nameless, forgotten individuals, then and now—travel wasn’t an option, not even a journey across the street. Home was prison.

That’s why it’s not the bookshelf that is most haunting, or Anne’s diary entries about having to be quiet and not open the curtains, "not even an inch"—it’s the mundane details, the ones so symbolic of our everyday existence. These are what make you realize that the Frank family passed their days and lived their lives—every aspect, every moment—in this space, in constant fear but also constantly trying to transcend that fear and create something akin to the humdrum happiness of normalcy. The concentration camps are not something that tourists can begin to fathom, so we really don’t even try. But this hiding space—this living space—is something we can relate to, which makes it, in a peculiar way, more real, more searing, more heartbreaking.

So while the house might start off as just another place to visit and check off, it ends up genuinely moving, chilling, enraging. History has come alive in the most unsettling way.

I know that some people leave somehow uplifted and inspired by Anne’s hopeful words, buoyed by their lyricism and introspection in the face of great evil. That’s not how I felt. I left disconcerted and upset by the ending of the story—I’m sorry, but no matter how positive Anne’s sentiments, and how admirable her ability to see the good in humanity, the fact is, she was a prisoner in her own house for years, and then she was captured and killed. Life’s pretty fucked-up: that’s my take-away message. It’s impossible to leave the house without being at least a bit pissed off and teary-eyed.

Near the end of the tour, I saw the British woman who had been in line in front of us, the Stereotypical Tourist with the flip-flops and tales of getting plastered all over the world. Now, her sunglasses were off and her makeup was streaked.

I followed her to the exit and we stepped out into the sunlight, young and free.