Enough With the Road Less Traveled: Six Ways to Enjoy the Beaten Path On Your Own Terms

Here's a great conversation-killer when you're talking travel: "I like the beaten path."

It's right up there with "I just can't [scratch] get rid of [scratch scratch] these bedbugs" and "For style and function on the road, you really can't beat cargo-pant Zubaz."

But I do like the beaten path. I feel no shame in saying that, even as I brace myself for the ensuing awkward silence.

The thing is--and I'm far from the first to say this, and it's a point I discuss quite a bit in the book--there's a reason people go there, a reason the path is beaten: because there's some cool stuff there. It's just as absurd to avoid a place simply because other people are there (even lots of other people) as it is to go there for the express purpose of following the crowds. And sometimes, yeah, the crowds are too thick, the site not actually all that attractive. Sometimes the tourist-haters are right. But not always. And that's a judgment you really need to make for yourself, on your own terms.

It's not just the "there's cool stuff there" argument that wins me over, though. Because sometimes (hello, Venice) even if a place is beautiful or interesting, the innate touristy-ness of the place--the crowds, the souvenir stands, the fact that you've seen all these sites in movies and friends' postcards--does rather detract from the over all allure.

I also like the beaten path precisely because of the extra effort required to make it feel interesting and new. Even in the midst of crowds, there are some measures you can take to shift the focus.

(And besides which, if you'll forgive one last digression, it's not like the proverbial road less traveled can't lead to its own flavor of misery. I mean, if I learned nothing from the important lessons of all those Hitchcock movies I watched at at far-too-early age, it's that taking one wrong turn will almost always lead to you being either (a) dead or (b) falsely accused of murder and tied up in a sprawling and sinister plot that involves, at minimum, the FBI, organized crime, and a femme fatale whose innate and oh-so-sublime sultriness is rather diminished by that whole fatale part.)

Manneken Pis in Brussels. Discuss.

Anyway. Like so, so many other things in life, travel is what you make of it. And here, based on my own experiences on that well-trod trail, are six ways to enjoy the beaten path on your own terms.

1. People-watch. Just sit on a bench or in a sidewalk cafe and watch the parade of life pass by. I mean, don't be creepy about it--you don't want the friendly local residents to call the cops about the shifty-eyed weirdo, lest you end up needing to reference the "What To Do If You're Tossed In Jail" section of your guidebook. But do just sit and watch. The world's an interesting place. Take it in. To make things more interesting, start keeping tallies of various archetypes: businesspersons traveling in packs; kids on skateboards; art-school hipsters who nonconform in the same way as all their counterparts in every other city on the planet; tourists trying to blend in but failing spectacularly.

2. Chat up the service industry workers. The woman at the gift shop, the server at the gelateria. If they're originally from the place, ask them how it's changed--or just, you know, ask them for their own advice. If they're immigrants--and a ton of service-industry workers are--ask them for their local-but-outsider take on this place. Touristic transactions don't have to be cold and impersonal.

 3. Look for the unfamiliar takes on things that are familiar to you. Because sometimes the sorta-familiar things can seem even more bizarre than the wholly new, because you understand the template but not the end result. Watch a Japanese sitcom, even if you don't speak Japanese, and see if the stock characters and situations hew to your expectations. Listen to the unintelligible trash-talk of Vienna teenagers playing pickup basketball in a park. Go to the local fast-food joint and order the least-familiar item on the menu. Also look around for the remixed versions of the local food or music—the immigrants' take on the traditional local music, or the locals' take on their immigrant neighbors' traditional foods. Look for the caroms of culture, the reinterpretations that create(as I put it in the book) the discreet poetry of the everyday but unexpected.

4. Indulge in the kitsch. Buy a tacky postcard and send it to your best friend. Go to a landmark and take a photo with a ridiculous pose—pretending to wear the Eiffel Tower as a hat, for example. Be silly. No shame. I mean, come on: You're an outsider in an unfamiliar place--that's the stuff of sitcoms right there. Embrace the absurdity of the situation. Have fun with it.

5. Or, be serious. Become a student of history. Nearly every tourist site is famous for a good reason—its innovative design, its astonishing back story. Read every brochure and plaque you can find. Brussels's iconic statue, Manneken Pis, is weird, but he's pretty interesting—and, okay, even weirder still—once you know just how popular he is and why.

6. Get lost. Shut the guidebook, turn off the smartphone, close the map, and wander. Trust in your own instincts and the Goddess Serendipity (and the fact that reality typically does not, in fact, conform to sinister Hitchcock plots). If you see something interesting in the distance or smell an interesting smell, go investigate. Lower your expectations and your understanding of where you are; reintroduce an element of mystery.

Do guidebooks create the beaten path?

I have a recent edition of Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door. Here's what it says on the back cover: “Avoid crowds and tourist traps . . . Discover off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”

But as anyone who has followed the insider knowledge of such guidebooks can attest, by the time you get to one of these hidden gems, you'll find a dozen other tourists already there, each one bearing your same guidebook and the glum expression that says, "This is not what I was promised."

You know that famous Yogi Berra line, "No one goes there; it's too crowded"? With guidebooks, we get just the opposite phenomenon: everyone goes there because it's not crowded.

This is nothing new. A 1963 profile of Arthur Frommer in Time included the following anecdote:

Last week in Paris one proud hotelier told Frommer: "It is your book which bought this elevator." But the new lift meant higher rentals, and Frommer sadly made a note to drop the hotel from the next edition. 

Or there's this, from the 1966 edition of Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe (and which serves as a reminder that the snarkiness of youth is timeless):

In the low-cost field the most popular guide is Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day, which has become so widely circulated among American tourists that you will generally find them sitting on top of each other in the hotels and restaurants recommended.

The most telling example of a guidebook's impact on a place is, I think, one that involves Frommer's rival Temple Fielding, he of the raffia basket carry-on and the portable record players and the mink-covered beer can opener. Such was the impact of his guidebook that, according to John McPhee's 1968 New Yorker profile, "A waiter's strike in Italy was postponed when leaders of the national waters' union were informed that Fielding was in the country."

The guidebook effect extends way off the beaten path, too. In Getting Stoned With Savages, J. Maarten Troost travels to the South Pacific island of Malekula, where he meets a man while walking through the forest:

"I am George," he said curtly. "Do you have a Lonely Planet?"

I did indeed have a Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu. We had brought it out from the U.S. Remarkably, they had a chapter on Malekula, which I had read thoroughly, highlighting all the references--and there were many--to the dangers posed by sharks.

"Turn to page one-fourteen," he said. "Do you see?" He jabbed at the page. "That's me."

The entry to which he referred read, in its entirety: "In the village on Wala Island, George's Guestroom  is small, for one or two people."

And have you read Eat, Pray, Love? Don't lie. You're reading a travel blog. I'm just going to guess, then, that you've either read or intentionally avoided Elizabeth Gilbert's gazillion-copy-selling spiritual self-help tract masquerading as travel writing. Just a hunch.

Anyway. So she goes to Bali. To (proper-noun) Love. But she's not quite done with the praying and the physical health stuff, either. Gilbert befriends a healer named Wayan, and decides to help her out--in part so that Wayan can reach that eternal goal of the tourist-area business owner: a listing in a prominent guidebook.

If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. 

As it turns out, Lonely Planet was not the book that really put Wayan on the tourist trail. That, of course, fell to . . . Eat, Pray, Love.  From Time last month:

Wayan, an outspoken Indonesian healer of dark beauty and another of Eat, Pray, Love's personalities, was, with her young daughter and two adopted orphans, once on the verge of eviction. Now a staff of well-built men churns out her healthful Vitamin Lunches for calling travelers. From January to March of 2006, 237,260 foreign tourists stopped by Bali. Since then the number has swelled steadily, and in the same three months of this year, there were 551,186 visitors to the island.

While precise figures are not yet available, industry observers from the Denpasar Tourism Academy have confirmed that the island has been repopulated by tourists looking to develop their spirituality. . . . "It's a thing we want to promote because those activities bring peace to mind," says Nyoman Suwidjana, deputy chairman of the Bali Tourism Board. "And Bali loves peace."

Emphasis mine. Just in case you missed the irony. 

Chef Boyardee and the meaning of authentic cuisine

One evening in Florence, I had some bold journalistic investigations to undertake. I needed to eat pizza.

Before we go on, please take a good look at these Life magazine ads from 1956:

"Your first taste of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Ravioli lets you know this is the true Italian dish."

"That's the way they serve pizza in Amalfi!"

In 1944, a New York Times article about a just-opened pizzeria led with this description of the exotic foodstuff: “One of the most popular dishes in southern Italy, especially in the vicinity of Naples, is pizza—a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes. Cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and so on may be used.” Gosh, sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?

Twenty years after that rather detached, straightforward description appeared, pizza was so commonplace that in the menu phrasebook section of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Arthur Frommer offers not a translation but a wiseacre wink: “You know this one.”

Now, another fifty years on, I settled myself into a corner table at one of Arthur’s recommended restaurants—he claimed, “no surprises; no cover,” but surprise, Arthur, there was a two-euro cover—and ordered my own “pie made from a yeast dough” to see how it measured up. It was good enough, with the crust slightly charred from the wood-fired oven and the slight saltiness of the prosciutto perfectly balancing with the creamy mozzarella and the earthy depth of the funghi.

But here’s what struck me: it wasn’t as good—or as authentic—as the pizza I can get at either of two different restaurants in my neighborhood back home in Minneapolis. With their imported San Marzano tomatoes, artisanal toppings, mozzarella di bufala, and sea salt-dusted crusts, these are marketed as paragons of the authentic Italian cuisine. One restaurant is a member of Vera Pizza Napoletana, the official and famously strict arbiter of true Neapolitan pizza. Even the decor and menu design of those pizzerias back home are superficially more authentic, more Old World Italian than the restaurants I visited in Florence.

Today, some of Arthur’s and my mother’s comments about Italian foods seem nearly as naive and wide-eyed as that 1944 Times article. Arthur lists fettuccine and risotto in the vegetable section, for example; most Americans today would probably not just recategorize them but smirk at the accurate-but-not-entirely translations of these as “noodles” and “rice,” of gelato as merely “ice cream,” and of prosciutto as simply “ham.” Mom explained the concept of a trattoria to my father in one of her letters and waxed rhapsodic about a particularly exotic dish that I immediately recognized, having seen it on multiple restaurant menus back home, as saltimbocca.

Though Arthur and my mother undoubtedly had their own preconceptions of Europe, based on photographs, books, and previous tourists’ tales, the information available to them before their trips was paltry compared to what today’s information-overloaded travelers have at their disposal. Mom didn’t have a hundred different guidebooks and a thousand different web sites telling her what to expect. Italian food hadn’t become so commonplace as to be cliché, as evidenced by Wendy’s recent short-lived line of sandwiches marketed under the Italian-by-way-of-focus-group name Frescata or, most of all, Fancy Feast's gourmet cat foods, which include both Florentine and Tuscany lines, apparently intended for the sophisticated, citizen-of-the-world felines: “Romance your cat's taste buds with Fancy Feast Tuscany wet cat food recipes. Tuscany recipes are accented with long grain rice and garden greens.”

The fact is, in any given urban area in the United States today, you can easily find food that is more authentically Italian than that found in most cafes in tourist areas of Italy. That wasn’t at all true in 1960s America, where “Italian” basically meant cheap wine and gummy spaghetti, or the previously-mentioned Chef Boyardee. Most travelers of that era likely had not experienced even the watered-down, theme park version of Italian cuisine presented, today, by the likes of Buca di Beppo and The Olive Garden. Their expectations of Italian cuisine in Italy—of Italian culture in general—were not the same, not as high, as modern tourists'. Mom and Frommer and their peers couldn’t presume to believe they knew exactly what to expect, which was probably for the better. They didn't expect their pizza to taste a certain way; they weren't measuring the tourist cafe against the better Italian food back home.


Put another way--and this applies to more than just food--back then they were ignorant; today we’re delusional. 

One more 1956 Chef Boyardee ad for you: 

"Chef is the one spaghetti this side of the ocean that makes a special point of following old-country traditions."

Friday Flicks: The Glockenspiel in Munich

Remember the Glockenspiel? Also known as Ye Olde Chuck E. Cheese? Europe's second-most-disappointing tourist attraction? No? Yeah, I've tried to repress it, too. But just in case you were wondering if it is really as silly as I claimed, here's proof, complete with some mocking commentary from our tour guide.

You have now seen more of the Glockenspiel than anyone ever needs to see. If you're in Munich, take my advice and skip it.  (There, I just saved you a good twenty to thirty minutes of your life. You're welcome.)

Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places: Venice

Oh, sure, it looks pretty enough in the photo. Delightfully historic buildings. Placid canal. Ornate wrought iron railing on the bridge adding some visual contrast to the surrounding rectilinear forms. The bright blue of the gondola catching your eye, a delightfully dissonant counterpoint to the yellow/beige of the buildings. ... The Hard Rock Cafe in the background.

Yep. Hard Rock Cafe. This is one of those rare not-so-flattering photos where it's the details, not the broader shot, that makes it all the less flattering.  Here's the close-up:

Tourist photos, tacky and otherwise

You may have seen my photo series Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Landmarks (and, by the way, if this book thing doesn't work out, my Plan B is to license those pics to Design Within Reach, because I think they'd make for great bleak-but-quirky hipster home decor).

For more travel photos in a similar vein, I'd like to direct your attention to the blog Tacky Tourist Photos. These guys get it--the ridiculousness of the traveler vs. tourist argument; the joy of visiting famous places and doing cheesy things, no matter how much of a cliche they are; the innate humor of photo-jacking "The Last Supper" at a wax museum in Branson.

Unlike a lot of the "zany photos of ___" blogs out there (see: LOLcats, Failblog, Unhappy Hipsters, etc., etc.), TTP isn't simply an excuse for self-aware, snarky, and/or oh-so-clever commentary.  The tone is just about right: gentle mockery. Here's what they have to say for themselves:

We know that “tacky” has a negative connotation amongst the dictionary-reading public. But we consider “tacky” to be a good thing.

We liken it to “kitschy.” The reason we did not call this project Kitschy Tourist Photos is because it would kill the alliteration.

We love to connect with other travelers not afraid to act a little goofy sometimes and who do not take themselves too seriously.

Curator Darren Garnick, by the way, is the guy who wrote the previously-mentioned (and decidedly not tacky) essay about badly-behaved tourists at Auschwitz. I love that he has serious world traveler cred (the guy's been to Vanuatu. Have you been there? Could you even find it on a map? Yeah, I didn't think so.) but still enjoys taking cheesy tourist pics.  

And with that, I present to you a few of my own photos, in a series that I will call, in the spirit of the pretentious artwork titles at the already-mocked Venice Biennale: "Untitled. (The Traveler.) (In Famous Places.) (With A Book.) (That is Very Old.) (And Outdated.) (Part I)"

Mozart memorial, Vienna

Museumplein, Amsterdam

Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen

The Forum, Rome

Piazza San Marco, Venice

[Just don't feed the pigeons in Venice. You might get hit with a 500-euro fine.]

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.

Ye Olde Chuck E. Cheese

Lee's still posting photos and back-story on his blog, which reminds me that I never got around to writing about one of the sillier things we saw, Munich's Glockenspiel, a.k.a. Europe's second-most-disappointing tourist attraction.*

Let's  check in with Arthur—or rather, a correspondent he quotes in the “Readers' Suggestions” section at the end of the chapter—for a description:

One of the best free sights in Europe is the Glockenspiel, the animated clock tower of the city Rathaus, which “performs” at 11 a.m. each day, which its colorful figures dance the ancient steps of the Beer Barrel Makers. Get there about 15 minutes early for a good viewing-and-picture-taking position right across the street.  

I'd like to think that this comment is a sign of a more innocent time, that it conclusively demonstrates that not so long ago, life was more full of wonder, people were more easily amused. Because my reaction to it—indeed, the only possible reaction for the twenty-first-century viewer—is: That's it? Really? Thousands of people watch this every day?

Again, maybe our outlook on life has changed. Perhaps, having grown up with Chuck E. Cheese and its animatronic animal house band, and, later, experiencing all manner of robotics and themed environments at Disneyland and restaurants like the Rainforest Cafe (to say nothing of the eye-popping special effects of Hollywood blockbusters), I'm just not capable of appreciating what is essentially a glorified wind-up toy.

I'm not alone. Of the three or four hundred other people filling the plaza, only a handful were smiling at the spectacle. Or perhaps I should say, only a handful were smiling with what one might conceivably call delight; plenty were snickering or smirking with incredulity.  Some looked downright miserable, their faces fixed with a stoic gaze upon their cameras, which they held high in trembling, tiring hands, documenting every halting movement of the mechanical figures high above:

(No, I don't have any photos of the damn Glockenspiel itself. As Lee points out, watching the crowd is a lot more interesting.)

Seriously disappointing--although really, it didn't sound that interesting even in concept.  If you have a twisted sense of humor, you might find the weird marionette jester figurine mildly amusing, what with its goofy costume and seriously sketchy mechanical hip-thrusts. So those might--might--keep you amused for all of three seconds. But the whole thing lasts some 12-15 minutes, during which even the most committed Luddite will inevitably give thanks for living in an age of video games and other things a bit more whiz-bang than this.  (Incidentally, the Most Disappointing Tourist Attraction in Europe is--apparently--the Glockenspiel in Prague, which claims the top honor because it goes on for nearly half an hour. Lordy.  I could be eating like four or five pastries in that amount of time!)

Yet despite the absurdity and dullness of the Glockenspiel, despite the fact that it was clear from the thirty-second mark that it was never going to get at all more interesting, no one walked away before it was done. People may not have actually enjoyed the Crappy Spectacular, but they still felt obligated to document it, per tourist protocol.  The point of tourism, after all, not to do what's fun or interesting, necessarily—it's to check the site off your list and move on to the next page in your guidebook.

And that's what travel has become, to many people: not an opportunity to see new lands and experience new cultures, but merely to breeze past their greatest hits, to audit their most superficial traits and sights for purposes of saying you've done what everyone else has already done before you.

---
* Source: our tour guide, who was a major misogynist jackass (and about whom the less said the better), but whose facts seemed in order.  He cited Some Reliable Publication whose name I don't recall at the moment.

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.

Postcards from my mom

(Not to be confused with Postcards From Yo Momma.)

From her 1967 trip. Note the first line: It's real! It looks like Venice is supposed to look.

Or, as some jaded American students I met last night put it, "This city is like that Disney place, with the pavilions for the different countries."

"Epcot?"

"Yeah, Epcot. It's like Epcot."

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.

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?