Book Outtake: Always Something Weird in Amsterdam

In the comments following my last post, about how to enjoy the beaten path, Lee pointed out that we when we patronized Europe's myriad drinking establishments, we would typically make a point of sitting at the bar to chat up the bartenders and get a bit of local insider knowledge. That comment reminded me of a deleted scene from the book, so here's an outtake. Enjoy!

Everywhere we went in Amsterdam, we spotted these creepily dapper young men, in groups of five or ten. Probably in their early twenties. They wore dark sportcoats, black ties, carefully-groomed hair, vacant looks in their eyes, and unidentifiable but vaguely New Agey amulets around their necks. Lee's theories about who they were ranged from Scientologists to competing a capella singing groups.

Now, by the university, we spotted yet another group of them. And this time, Lee wasn't going to settle for mere idle speculation. This time, he wanted answers. This time, he said, "Let's follow them.”

Amsterdam is, famously, not a wholesome place. Not dangerous per se. But not wholesome. Not the sort of place where you mess around with possible cultists. Or a capella singers.

* * *

On the landmark Skinny Bridge--which our canal boat tour guide described only as historic and the most-photographed bridge in Amsterdam (“So I will slow down to allow you to take your own photos”)--we had seen seven of these men standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a row, facing another three, who appeared to be giving orders.

Near our hotel, in the heart of the tourist area by the train station, another group had walked by, some of them with an extra, incongruous accessory: a chartreuse sweatshirt, dirty and mangled and seemingly pulled from a canal, tied loosely around their necks, preppie-style. On the front of the sweatshirts was a large orange and yellow logo for a company, or perhaps an oddly-named sect, called Taco Mundo. The addition of the sweaters, needless to day, did nothing to diminish our confusion.

At this moment, by the university, there were perhaps two dozen of them milling around, chatting and casting furtive glances at passersby.

Three of them broke off from the group and headed toward the Red Light District.

“I've got it--I know who they are, ” Lee said as we followed them from a safe distance, my legs striding quickly to keep up while up in my brain, dueling thought-factions of anxiety and adventurousness grappled for control over my muscles. “They're the European version of a street gang.”

Rain clouds formed above us, darkening the skies and lending our pursuit a dramatic, ominous air that rather unsettled me. Anxiety was winning.

The dapper dudes dodged past families and tour groups, their strides purposeful, never slowing, even when the rain began. At the edge of the Red Light District, they stopped in front of the door to a building that, unlike many of the others here in the surprisingly-clean Red Light District, had a truly dilapidated appearance and a nefarious aura. For a few moments, they spoke with a young woman sitting on a chair in front of the door. Then they disappeared inside.

* * *

The skies opened up, drenching us, so we took shelter in the nearest bar. Lee was in his element, immediately striking up conversation with our bartender, Klara, a cute blonde graduate student from Poland. When she confessed to not knowing much about some of the liquor bottles on the shelves behind her, he excitedly explained the finer points of the various boozes, adding commentary and asides like, “I knew some people who drank Ricard. They were trapeze artists.”

He offered to teach her how to make a particularly daring and esoteric shot.

“You'll do one with us, right?” he asked, flashing a grin that I was beginning to think of as his trademark, a smile that goads you, charms you, into doing something that your common sense is strenuously advising you to avoid.

Klara giggled nervously. “Okay!”

“And you'll let us have them for free, right? Since I'm teaching you how to do it?”

“Oh, I don't …” Her gaze met Lee's. Game over. “Okay, my boss is not here. If he comes, you will have to pay. But if he does not, then it's okay.”

We could hear the rain pick up outside. More drenched patrons surged through the door.

“Busy,” Klara said, frowning, and went off to serve the newcomers.

* * *

Within a few moments, Klara's boss appeared, which meant no free booze for us—a relief for me, because I wasn't sure I trusted Lee's secret shot not to leave me retching in the gutter or, worse, dancing on top of the bar. I was content to nurse my beer.

All around the bar, there were ads some kind of Bolivian alcohol made with coca leaf. Lee asked Klara about it, noting that he'd never seen it in the US. Was it illegal back home? She shrugged. Probably. That was all the enticement Lee needed. He ordered one. It was bright green and looked like it probably glowed in the dark.

“Time for some hallucinations,” Lee smirked as he tossed it back. Luckily for posterity and Lee's future ambitions for elected office, I videotaped the key moment:

* * *

Klara noticed my book sitting on the bar. “Europe on five … dollars? Each day?”

“Yep, that's all we can spend,” Lee said, that grin creeping back. “You can't charge us anything more.”

Klara's eyes widened, and she was speechless until Lee burst out laughing and explained the project. She understood the concept, but not the appeal. “Every day, something weird in Amsterdam,” she said.

* * *

Which reminded us of something. The Dapper A Capella Cult Gang.

"Question for you," Lee said to Klara. "We've been seeing these guys around town ..."

Klara nodded in recognition as he explained. We waited for her explanation.

"They are very bad men," we expected her to say. Well, okay, I expected it. She would then continue, "You must avoid them if you want to see your families and internal organs again."

Perhaps Lee's glow-in-the-dark Bolivian coca alcohol would factor into it--the booze brainwashed you, made you into a zombie who survived only on glow-in-the-dark coca and Taco Mundo.

And brains.

I leaned forward on my bar stool as Klara winced and started to speak. I looked around the room, wondering if perhaps she should speak in a whisper, lest the wrong persons hear. I scoped out the closest exits.

Klara rolled her eyes. “Student group,” she said. “Like you have in American movies.”

We thought for a few moments. “Fraternities?” Lee asked, his brain evidently more optimistic than mine. “Like in Animal House?”

“I do not know this one,” Klara replied.

"It's like a club, and they live together. And before they can join, they have to do stupid stuff," Lee said.

"Ah, yes. One of these."

Lee and I both sighed slightly. Mine was relief; his was disappointment.

Book postscript: Sidekick makes good

If you've read the book or kept tabs on my trip as it unfolded, you know Lee. Here's the first mention of him in Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day:

Allow me to introduce my friend Lee. “Friend” might be stretching it, actually, because the truth is, I barely knew him. We had spent a grand total of perhaps three or four hours together in person, at a writers’ conference in Key West, where we’d met two years earlier; since then, we’d kept in touch via email. Lee’s a novelist, bartender, and freelance scribe whose beats include nightlife and the singles scene. He lives in Baltimore and looks a bit like the actor Ryan Gosling. He has a quick, broad smile and, always, a wry gleam in his eyes. From what I’d gathered from our limited interactions and the man- about- town tone of his writing, he was the very definition of dashing and rakish—in other words, an appropriately inappropriate sidekick for someone who is, as the Dutch say, kindofaneuroticintrovert.

Reading that, and the rest of the book, you probably wouldn't think of Lee as the settling-down-and-getting-married type, at least not in the remotely foreseeable future--except, perhaps, to the Contessa we encountered in Munich. And in any case, by the time we got onto our respective airplanes back to the States, it was clear that there would be no Hollywood-worthy enchantment, no perfectly-scripted tales of European romance, ending with Alpine castles and the words "Happily Ever After" in a filigreed script.


Now, throughout the book, I tweak some of the tropes of travel memoirs, particularly the ones with sub-titles like How I Dropped Out of the Corporate Rat Race and Went to a Traditional Village and Herded Goats and Found Love and Meaning and Happiness.

If I'm to be honest, though, I have to confess that even though I was staying on the beaten path, and even though I roll my eyes at the paint-by-numbers epiphanies of so many travel books, I was secretly crossing my fingers for some of that myself. I mean, that is how it's supposed to work, right? Every passport stamp brings you closer to Total Happiness™? Especially when you're traveling with a vintage travel guide that you  like to imagine has some sort of old-fashioned magical powers?

But, no, it didn't work out like that. (And I spoil nothing about the book, I hope, by mentioning this fact.)

Of course it didn't. You can't script life.

But there's a twist. Always.


When Lee got back to Baltimore, he had a first date with Angy, a woman he'd met only briefly before. He mentioned to her that he'd just been in Europe, and she casually said, oh, that's interesting, tell me more. They started dating and she soon confessed, to Lee's amusement, that she'd been following our exploits through my blog—she knew all about the trip. As I was finishing my manuscript, Lee e-mailed me to say that they were engaged. I know it's naïve, wishful thinking to imagine that our trip had anything to do with that, but even so, I like to hold out hope that perhaps my guidebook had some residual supernatural properties after all.

My book tour in April ended in Washington, DC. The destination was intentional and the timing was intentional, because the following night, I had a commitment just up the road, in Baltimore: Lee and Angy's wedding. 

CONGRATS, LEE AND ANGY!

The morning after the wedding, over a late brunch with Lee and Angy and a small group of their friends, the story of Angy's blog-stalking came up again, in the context of introducing me. Lots of raised eyebrows and knowing grins in my direction: "Ooh, you're THAT guy!" 

I've gotta tell you: they're perfect together, not least because Angy shares Lee's kindness and spirit of adventure and, yes, that wry grin. I'm looking forward to hearing their own tales of journeys together. (For example, they just moved from Baltimore to Salt Lake City, where they are the resident cocktail experts and worm-keepers. You can read all of their exploits and findings, including the differences between "magic dust" in Baltimore and Utah, on their aptly-named blog, BmoreInUtah.) 

I'm also looking forward to traveling with them someday--a happy anticipation that is tempered with a dash of terror at hearing not one but two different people urging me to do something by saying, with matching wry grins, "Come on, Doug ... Spirit of adventure!" 

Actually, make that three people saying that, because I recently got engaged. And my blog inadvertently helped woo my globe-trotting fiancee, Maren. 

And ... well, that's another, longer story. 

Commentary Track Bookmarks

A while back--like, a long while back--I was thinking about merchandise tie-ins for my book: 

What would be the logical options? Um. Tacky t-shirts. Tourist action figure (Now whips out the camera 3 times faster!). Postcards. Beer bottles or coasters, maybe. Pastries, definitely. Yes, that's it: [Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day]-branded croissants! Any bakers who read this should call me to talk numbers, make deals, plan strategy. Big money awaits! Mega-profits guaranteed!!

For some reason, that never quite worked out. Alas. Neither did the plan to give give away canal-side houses in Amsterdam to all of my readers. I tried, but, man, you wouldn't believe the paperwork. 

What I settled on instead was this: Commentary Track Bookmarks. 

DVDs come with commentary tracks and assorted extras, so why shouldn't books? Commentary Track Bookmarks are, yes, bookmarks featuring page-specific outtakes, notes on the writing process, photos, and other behind-the-scenes insights into my travels and my book. They were inspired in part by my friend Rolf Potts's excellent book Marco Polo Didn't Go There, which had commentary track sections at the end of each story.

There are forty different bookmark designs--collect 'em all! Come to one of the book tour events and I'll give you one--or send me a letter or postcard and I'll include one in my reply. Below are two examples; there are more at the bottom of each page as you click around the book web site. 

And if you're wondering how to some for yourself, there's a bit of a trick involved. . . .

Outtakes: Pastries in Brussels

Alas, I had to cut this from the book. When we were in Brussels, Lee wrote a guest post about my pastry problem. I'm not sure if he was feeling guilty (not that he should have) or just being the all-around good guy he is, but here's what happened the next morning:

Most mornings, I was the first to arise, but I move so slowly before breakfast that by the time I showered and got dressed and got my satchel ready for the day's explorations, Lee had already done the same, plus completed his daily reps of push-ups and stretches, and written a page or two of his work-in-progress, a space pirate opera.

This time, he hadn't waited around. Probably a wise move, I realized, given that my brain was starting up more slowly than usual. There turned out to be a second light show a half-hour or so after the first one, and shortly after that was done, a jazz band somewhere down the street struck up “The Girl From Impanema,” the horn section trying its best to drown out the rhythmically-challenged drummer in an epic battle of beats and noise. The clear losers were our ears and desire for sleep. So I had called in reinforcements as soon as the second show began, downing a couple of Tylenol PM pills and shoving some earplugs in until they practically tickled my tonsils. This appeared to have done the trick, perhaps too well. I stumbled to the bathroom, shooed the pigeons from the open window and slammed it shut, then stepped into the shower, letting the initial blast of ice water hit me full in the face.

When I emerged from the bathroom, Lee was sitting on his bed, writing. There was a yellow bakery bag on the desk a few feet away; the smell of fresh croissant perfumed the air. “Mornin',” he grinned. “I got something for you.”

“Feeding my addiction?”

“Might as well. Fighting it is clearly a lost cause.”

I have to confess to finding this very touching, but also a bit worrisome: Did I trust him—anyone—to select a pastry for me? It's a serious question. I have standards. Breaking bread together may be one of the most deeply-rooted symbols of friendship, but what if the bread turns out to be crap? A kind gesture turns into a deal-breaker, and then what do you do?

Still, when someone offers me a croissant, I will not turn it down, even if I will immediately start thinking of potential diversions, should I need to spit it out.

I needn't have worried. I should have known, by this point, to trust Lee. The croissant was hot and flaky and gooey and delicious. We planned our day as we ate, spilling crumbs all over the map.

Outtakes: Doing the Tourist Dance at the Roman Forum

The Tourist Dance is the new Macarena, the new Electric Slide, the new Soulja Boy. You do it at a tourist site by walking up to someone and holding out your camera and quickly pointing to yourself and the other person and the camera. At major landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, your Tourist Dance partner is probably already approaching you when you start. So you both point and ask, "Foto?" and laugh awkwardly and take each other's pictures. Also works as a great icebreaker at tourists sites. Seriously. Anyway, a funny thing happened, uh, at the Forum ...

I approached a sixty-ish British couple and initiated the Tourist Dance. When I handed my camera to the man, he started walking away. His wife called out to him, “Dear! Where are you going?”

“I've got to get back quite a ways to get the whole thing in the photo with the man,” he said. His tone was proper but gruff, and his thick white mustache bounced with authority as he spoke. If you'd swapped his Nike cap for a pith helmet and given him a monocle, he could have been a classic British general in a far-flung outpost. He turned and yelled for me to smile. His wife stepped out of the way--although, as it turned out, not far enough.

The General strode back and showed off his handiwork. “Got just about the whole thing in there!”

I was basically a speck at the bottom of the image.

“Yes, and you forgot the poor man in the midst of it all,” the General's wife said. She took my camera. “Right then, love, let's have another go--one where your friends can see you without squinting. ”

Much better. "Now your friends will know you really were here," she said.

Below: their two efforts.

Outtakes: a time-warp deli in Rome

Cut from the Rome chapter. 

“Rome is a difficult town in which to find a budget restaurant,” Arthur Frommer writes in Europe on $5 a Day. “There are only three small areas in this entire large city where you'll discover anything resembling a cluster of good, low-cost eating spots.”

Thankfully, that's changed.Even when I found one of Arthur's recommendations still open, it turned out still to be budget-friendly—and good. Just now, I tracked down a place called Il Delfino for a late lunch. It's basically a Roman deli with, Arthur says, “a marvelous array of spit-roasted chickens, hors d'oeuvre counters, pizza ovens.” Exactly. Arthur commanded me to have pizza, and who was I to disobey? I munched contentedly as I soaked up the atmosphere: the conversations at a low-level buzz and, as far as I could tell, all in Italian (read: no tourists); the families with kids bearing sauce-enhanced grins; the endless array of foods spread behind the counter. It felt exactly like Arthur described it, like I'd stepped into a portal back to the 1960s. If Norman Rockwell were Italian, he would have painted this scene.

Outtakes: the Vatican gift shop

I don't think I have anything interesting or new to say about the Vatican, so I've decided to strike that scene from the book. But there was one exchange that I overheard, in the gift shop, that was too amazing not to share:

Male British tourist to female cashier: “Excuse me, do you sell action figures of the Pope? Ones that move?”

The cashier's eyes widened in horror. “No! Not here!”

“Do you know where I could get one?”

Long pause. Double-blink. Sigh. “Try a shop by Saint Peter's Square.”

Outtakes: trying not to be sketchy in Vienna

The Vienna chapter is a bit bloated and unwieldly; I'm trimming it into shape right now. Here's a scene I ended up cutting:  

My stomach grumbled. I trekked on and bought a pastry, ordering in flawless German. It had a distinctly Old World taste, that of thousand-year-old church mortar. I cursed in flawless English.

My sinus headache roared. My throat itched. My feet ached—everything ached, actually, from this nasty cold and from the washboard mattress at the hostel. I wandered into a park to sit for a while and dig into the bag of cough drops that I'd bought. There were several open benches near the entrance, and I started to sit down but thought better of it upon piecing together the circumstances: the benches were facing a playground filled with kids. And I was a single man. Specifically, I was a weirdo clutching a battered paperback and what appeared to be a bag of candy, and staring with watery, twitchy eyes. Perhaps in Austria, such persons are considered good luck, but I wasn't about to test it. I kept walking and found another cluster of benches, each with a man sitting alone.

“Excuse me,” I asked one. “Is this the area for the non-pedophiles?”

Well, that's what was implied, anyway, in my simple, “Gutten tag,” croaked as I sat heavily on the opposite end of a bench from him. I dug in my pocket for a tissue, then blew my nose like a trumpet fanfare. The guy eyed me and walked away, toward the playground.

The criminals in Paris are actually kind of charming

I'm writing the Paris chapter, and I had to cut this scene. So here ya go: an outtake!

E5D is not an all-purpose guidebook. It doesn't have tips on avoiding lines or how to dress in various cultures or how to keep in touch with the folks back home. It also has no advice on avoiding that eternal anxiety of travel, street crime.

So when a guy near the Eiffel Tower tried to scam me, I made me an easy mark. Luckily, I had found the single most inept criminal in history.

There are a lot of scams that modern guidebooks warn you about, many involving methods of distracting you while an accomplice picks your pocket (watch out for someone “accidentally” spilling something on you) or trying to give you a great price on goods that are, of course, counterfeit.

Here's how the one that I saw works, in theory: as you walk down the sidewalk, someone a few steps behind you tries to get your attention. He's holding a gold ring or other small, potentially expensive object. “You dropped this,” he says (most likely in English). You tell him that, no, you didn't. He looks at it, as if for the first time, and is stunned—stunned!—to find a marking labeling it as pure gold or otherwise authentic-and-pricey. Then the benevolent soul tries to sell you this prestigious item for a price so low that you really can't afford to pass up the opportunity. He refuses to take no for an answer, badgering you until you give him some cash to go away.

And here's how this guy did it: as I was about ten feet away, walking toward him, he conspicuously dropped a ring on the ground. He looked up at me for a split second, nonchalantly—just lookin' around, being a normal person—then whipped his gaze back toward the sidewalk, gesturing theatrically, jaw dropping to his knees. He pointed. Mon dieu! What have we here?

“Excusez-moi?” he said shyly, looking at me again. “You have dropped zee ring, monsieur?”

“Nope. Merci,” I said, trying not to laugh in his face.

“No, no. You … have dropped ... eet.” There were odd pauses in his wording, as though he couldn't recall his script. “I have seen! I am … helping you. Oui?”

“Non.”

“Ah. Okay. You would like … to buy? How much … will you pay? You make an offer.”

“No, really. Not interested.”

“Non?” I waited for the hard sell, but he offered only a look of confusion, searching his mind for the follow-up line but coming up blank.

“Oh. Okay,” he sighed, and walked away. 

Death and funny costumes in the afternoon

So I went to a bullfight.

PETA, hold your complaints. Arthur insisted that I go, so I did.

And really: it's kind of obligatory for the Madrid tourist, no?

No. It shouldn't be. Don't go. I'm a stereotypical tourist so that you don't have to be one, so that you can experience kitsch or, in this case, pageantry-filled brutality vicariously. And then skip it when you actually travel to Europe.

Technically, what I attended was a Novillada con picadores rather than a proper corrida--this featured younger matadors and bulls under four years old; think of it as a minor league bullfight.

Let us first note that you can buy tickets online through a Ticketmaster subsidiary. That's right: Ticketmaster sells bullfight tickets. There's no escape.

The plaza outside the stadium is a teeming mass of bullfight fans, scalpers, and stands selling an impressive variety of souvenirs and food. It's pretty much just like the scene at any professional sporting competition in the US, except that the Red Bull umbrellas at the food stands seem particularly out of place.

Your taste for irony sated, you enter the stadium and find your seat on the granite benches that make up the bleachers of the perfectly-round stadium.

Eventually, the action begins. There's a lot of pomp and circumstance and pageantry. Trumpets blare. Drums beat.

Two guys ride out wearing Pilgrim costumes, with doilies on their necks and towering yellow feather dusters on their hats. Their job is to look ridiculous. They do it well. They are followed by twelve guys in costumes that find the common ground between speed skating outfit and Liberace--uncomfortably tight, impossibly ornate, like Baroque Spandex. Then come six men on horses wearing blinders and padding that looks like a dust ruffle for a bed, only with fewer ruffles and more horse. Bringing up the rear are 15 newspaper vendors from the 1920s (knickers, funny hats). Their outfits have accidentally been washed with other colors, which have run; seven are off-red; eight are off-green. These are the groundskeepers.

Everyone disperses and the guys in the Baroque Spandex take up spots behind walls around the dirt ring, as though they're playing hide-and-go-seek. Which, in a way, they are.

A bull enters. A couple of the Baroque Spandex guys run out into the dirt circle and waves their capes, which are pink one side and yellow on the other. Very 1980s. The crowd cheers. They loved the '80s. Duran Duran was rad. When the bull gets within 50 feet of a Baroque Spandex guy, he squeals and sprints for cover. Scratch the hide-and-go-seek analogy: it's like a game of tag--except that the final "tag" is, of course, fatal.

After a while, a few of the Baroque Spandex guys arm themselves with nightclubs with skewers on the end. The men go to the center of the dirt ring and do the Chicken Dance with their nightclubs to attract the bull's attention. When it charges, they jab the nightclubs into bull's shoulders while in the same instant jumping the hell out of the way. This is actually fairly impressive. If the skewers fall out, though, the crowd boos.

Once six skewers are in the bull and it is good and tired and panting in the exact pathetic, exhausted manner of a cartoon critter--tongue out, posture lowered--another Baroque Spandex guy comes out. His cape is red. He is the matador. His job is to wave his cape dramatically (sometimes behind his back) and try to get the bull to charge lethargically. This works up the crowd, which cheers enthusiastically and sometimes jeers in the exact same tone as an American baseball fan yelling "C'mon, ump, get some glasses--he was safe by a mile!" The difference between actions that merit cheers and jeers is essentially imperceptible.

Eventually, the matador stabs the bull on the top of the neck, just above the head. At this point, it's an act of mercy--it's clearly suffering, it really seems to want to die. The bull falls to the ground. The crowd goes wild. Three horses come out and drag out the carcass, creating a trail of blood in the dirt.

I don't have any jokes to make at this point. It's pretty brutal, pretty grotesque.

It's also just not that interesting. It's not a fair fight; the outcome is never in doubt. And it's not manly, not a convincing expression of power or strength or primal energy. Sorry, Papa Hemingway--it's not. It has all the drama and intrigue of a playground bully shaking down a scrawny kid for milk money. Arm the bulls with lasers on their horns or make the matadors wrestle them with their bare hands, and then we can talk.

Until then, I don't understand the appeal. Again: predetermined outcome, not a fair fight. Even with all the ritual and funny costumes, it's just not compelling or entertaining. And they do it over and over--each night features several "fights," several bulls killed in the name of tradition and contrived Man vs. Beast competition.

Skip it. If you're interested, watch a bullfight on YouTube. But give it a pass when you're in Madrid. Spend the afternoon in Retiro Park instead, or eating paella.

Remember: I'm a tourist so that you don't have to be one. You're welcome.