Europe on
5 Wrong
Turns a Day
Europe on
5 Wrong
Turns a Day
One Man, Eight Countries,
One Vintage Travel Guide
Doug Mack
A Perigee Book
A PERIGEE BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
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EUROPE ON 5 WRONG TURNS A DAY
Copyright © 2012 by Doug Mack
All photos courtesy of the author
Text design by Tiffany Estreicher
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First edition: April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mack, Doug.
Europe on 5 wrong turns a day : one man, eight countries, one vintage travel guide / Doug Mack.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-56142-3
1. Tourism—Europe—History. 2. Mack, Doug—Travel—Europe. I. Title. II. Title: Europe on five wrong turns a day.
G155.E8M298 2012
914.04′5612—dc23
2011042234
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book describes the real experiences of real people. The author has disguised the identities of some, and in some instances created composite characters, but none of these changes has affected the truthfulness and accuracy of his story. Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
For my parents,
who taught me to love travel and
books and travel books. Here’s one
more for your collection.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing is a solitary endeavor, except that it’s not—especially not a travel memoir, since the basic nature of the task involves dropping in on unfamiliar cultures and basically spying on strangers’ lives. So thank you, first of all, to all the people I met on my journey, locals and tourists alike, who made my Not-So-Grand Tour come alarmingly close to being genuinely grand. (Even you, Drunk Girl in Amsterdam.) I’ve changed many of their names and identifying characteristics throughout the book, for purposes of privacy, but they’re all very much real people. Also, because I wasn’t always taking notes, some conversations are re-created from memory, to the best of my ability—although all of the best lines are 100 percent verbatim.
My literary agent, Elizabeth Evans at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, understood what I was trying to do with this book before even I did and was unfailingly supportive and a delight to work with. Writing this book was, of course, a journey in itself, and in Marian Lizzi, my editor, I had the ideal guide, showing me the way with patience and aplomb, and steering me back on course when my path started to meander (as it has a tendency to do). My deepest thanks also to Christina Lundy and the entire team at Perigee.
Several smart, patient friends read the manuscript at various stages, and their comments and guidance helped whip it into shape: Hannah Kaplan, Sebastian Celis, Rosalyn Claret, Alex Starace, James Lloyd, and most of all, Twin Cities travel-writing all-stars Frank Bures, Jason Albert, Leif Pettersen, and Maggie Ryan Sandford. And then there is Dennis Cass, guru and mentor and patient explainer of the publishing process, without whose initial push this would—truly— still be merely an idea kicking around in the back of my head.
I also would have been completely, panic-inducingly lost in the publishing world without the assistance of David Farley and the ongoing support of Michael Yessis and Jim Benning at WorldHum.com and the whole crew at the Key West Literary Seminar, who kindly keep letting me crash their party.
A multitude of other friends and colleagues provided more general but much-needed encouragement and advice plus soul-soothing pastries and beer, although now that I think about it, perhaps they were just trying to silence my incessant rambling on the history of tourism. In any case, thank you, Shirley Sailors, Amanda Nadelberg, John Neely, Rebecca Celis, David Brusie, Elizabeth Olson, Andrew Owen, Becky Fritz Owen, Maren Stoddard, John and Karly Case, Alexis Grant, Joseph Quintela, Rajan and Sunayana Vatassery, Vaughn Kelly, Chris Christofferson, Diane Sass, Michael Crull, and David Heide.
At various points in the writing process, I found myself pounding my head against the wall as I tried to track down assorted figures and pieces of background information. I avoided major brain (and drywall) damage thanks to the generous assistance of Sherry Ott, Steffen Horak, Jessalyn Pinneo, Arijit Guha, and others who pointed me toward the necessary information and insights. Feel free to blame them for any errors… just kidding, of course.
As will become evident in the following pages, I owe an unpayable debt to my parents, Bob and Patricia, and my sister, Elisabeth—my early enablers in writing, reading, and traveling, and unyielding in their support as I’ve chased my dreams, even the crazy ones. Thanks also to James Munger, brother-in-law and miracle worker, who restored my corrupted manuscript file two days before deadline. (Yeah. That happened.)
Mille grazie to Ann Schaefer (née Dynes), Mom’s traveling companion—both in 1967 and to this day—for allowing me to peek in on her life, too. Merci beaucoup to Paula Hirschoff, another traveler of their era, for sharing her stories and scrapbook with me.
My friend Lee turns out to be not just a talented writer and editor (and
was another key manuscript reader) but also, of course, a fantastic sidekick. Lee, man, I owe you a beer or ten. In Brussels. Also, I will note that Lee’s real name is Michael Lee Cook (he asked me to use his middle name as his nom de sidekick), and you really ought to check out his own writing at his splendidly named website, www.LiteratureIsNotDead.com.
And Arthur Frommer. Though we’ve never met or spoken, I’m profoundly grateful to you for spurring me—and my mother, and millions of others—on to one of my life’s grand adventures. I hope this book is a testament to your legacy—both that of your seminal guidebook and, more important, your continual exhortation to the masses to go out there and see the world. It’s an amazing place. Go see it sometime.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Book That Started It All
Florence: Authentically Overwhelmed
Paris: Life in a Movie Set
Amsterdam: Live and Let Live It Up
Brussels: Baffling Capital of a Baffling Continent
Berlin: Twice the City It Was
Munich: If You Brew It, They Will Come
Zurich: Money Matters
Vienna: Mozart Didn’t Blog
Venice: Brave New Old World
Rome: Eternal City of Tourism
Madrid: Better Living Through Tourism
Five Lists from My Travel Notebooks
Further Reading
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
—YOGI BERRA
INTRODUCTION
The Book That Started It All
I say that Europe can today be traveled,
comfortably and well, for living costs per person (that
is, room and board) of no more than $5 a day.
—Europe on Five Dollars a Day
It began as most things in my life do: awkwardly.
It was an October morning and I was at a book festival in downtown Minneapolis, killing time before meeting my mother, Patricia, with whom I was going to attend one of the readings. As I browsed through a table of musty secondhand volumes, I chuckled at all the ridiculous titles, things like The Tao of Tea Cozies and How to Get Rich in 2,451 Easy Steps. My eyes landed on one called Europe on Five Dollars a Day. Right, I thought. Good luck with that.
I’d heard of the book before, of course, and I knew, in the abstract, that the promise of its title was once feasible. Now, though? Now it seemed about as laughably outdated as those medieval maps with the areas outside of Europe unmarked but for the warning “here be dragons.” I thought of its potential as a conversation piece on my coffee table. I’d show it to friends, and we’d share a good laugh before resuming our usual conversation about how much our jobs sucked and how we never did anything cool anymore—too old for college shenanigans but, in our midtwenties, far too young for midlife crises. The book would sit unopened, like most coffee table tomes, its brightly colored cover serving as a piece of found art, a cheesy relic of retro design and the long-lost innocence of a bygone era. At ten cents, it was a cheap punch line. So I bought it.
A few minutes later, I spotted Mom.
“Look what I found,” I said, waving the book and snickering. “Europe on Five Dollars a Day! Pretty funny, huh?”
But she didn’t get the joke. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even roll her eyes, which is her usual response when I try a bit too hard to be a hip, ironic smart aleck.
Instead, her face lit up with manic glee—you’d think I was showing her a winning lottery ticket. She danced, she hugged me, she squealed, she shrieked, “Is that for me? Where did you find it?!”
As I struggled to make sense of her giddiness, my face cycled through a Grand Canyon’s worth of reds. I mean, far be it from me to confess to being one of those horrible people who’s still embarrassed by his mother even when he’s an adult. But the excited babbling, the jumping up and down, the frantic hugging: these were not the signs of a sane person. Heads turned to gawk at us. The latemorning sun slanted through the windows and sought us out across the cavernous room, spreading past the aisles of book vendors, past the literary magazine booths with their hip young staffers, past the book-signing tables where melancholy authors sat fidgeting with their uncapped pens, and casting a spotlight on us, the Weirdo Duo disrupting the literary quietude. A bookseller cast us an irritated glare and let out a sigh that threatened to progress to a full-on librarian shush.
I laughed nervously and scanned the table for Invisibility for Dummies. I waited for Mom to calm down a bit, then stammered, “No, I… What?! It’s for me.”
“Bob didn’t put you up to this?” she asked, still out of breath. Bob’s my father; her husband; the man with whom she had just spent a year in Scotland, the culmination of a lifelong dream and the logical result of their shared incurable wanderlust, which turns out to be a hereditary trait.
“Um, no.”
“I’ve been looking for that,” she said. “It’s the book I used with Ann.”
Ah. Finally things were starting to make sense.
Mom was one of the original hippie travelers, touring Europe with her friend Ann for ten weeks in 1967, when she was twenty-one, shortly before my parents got married. That much I already knew, because she still talks about it—rather a lot, actually, and often with a wistful tone and a slight smirk on her face, as though remembering details that she never intends to tell. It was a seminal event in her life, the catalyst for her peripatetic ways and the underlying reason why my childhood story times were heavy on the travel writing, as likely to include Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or a Calvin Trillin essay on street food as any of the classics of the children’s lit canon.
So this was her guide, the key to that famous trip, the cornerstone of her life as a traveler. The book seemed to acquire new weight in my hand. I looked down at its cover, somehow expecting that, as happens when Indiana Jones finds such relics, it would suddenly begin exhibiting supernatural powers—glowing or humming or conjuring spirits.
Mom took the book from my hand and gazed at it admiringly. “I’ve been looking for this,” she repeated.
“Yeah, apparently,” I said.
“I still have all my postcards to Bob, you know.”
“Seriously?”
“All the postcards, all the letters—they’re still around somewhere. I’m sure they’re very romantic. Or boring.” She paused, then added, brightly, “I think there’s even a letter I wrote on toilet paper! We were really on a budget.”
The fact that she still had them wasn’t particularly surprising, given that my parents seem averse to throwing out anything with words on it. This, I suppose, is the dream of all pack rats: that someday, your children will want to examine some aspect of your past, and you will be able to crow triumphantly that this—this!—is precisely why you have spent the last forty-plus years saving every scrap of paper that has come into your possession, and which you have sort-of-kind-of archived in assorted Leaning Towers of Clutter that fill your house, creating both a sense of sprawling intellectualism—so much to read, so little time!—and a more tangible feeling of fire hazard.
Actually finding a particular piece of paper was, of course, an entirely different matter. Unlikely, probably impossible.
But somehow she did it—almost immediately. I went over to my parents’ house to observe this miracle and discovered that, sure enough, she and my father—who had been back home in Minneapolis, in architecture school—had kept every last letter, postcard, and aerogram (remember those?) to each other. Most had been in the living room all along, throughout my entire childhood, crammed into shoeboxes and stashed under a coffee table along with stray kindling for the fireplace, a creepy antique duck decoy, and an impressive collection of spider webs (which is why I’d never looked under there before).
I sat on their living room floor and sifted through the contents of the boxes, taking care not to get them mixed in with the rest of the clutter scattered about the room.
From one-sentence postcards to meandering, multipage letters, they
were treasure troves of observations on the profound joy of travel, the disappointing nature of certain “must-see” destinations (Louvre, this means you), the constant torments of French plumbing and lecherous Italian men, and, of course, gooshy comments about how much they missed each other. They evoked, as images of the past often do, a sense of innocence and wonder, a free-spirited peace with the world that was far removed from my own existence.
Every few minutes, after reading Mom’s description of an exotic place or thrilling adventure, I paused and ruminated in frustration, wondering once again why I’d never done anything remotely this interesting, why I’d never acted on my passed-down wanderlust. I’d done a bit of travel writing, but always felt like a phony, culling from family trips abroad and a few solo excursions to the wilds of… Chicago, Key West, or Seattle. I’d never been anywhere more exotic on my own.
After an adolescence and college years of résumé-padding achievement, I had found myself stagnant in life and stuck in a dead-end job as a marketing assistant. I was so exhausted and frustrated at the end of each day that I didn’t have the energy to do much other than lie on my futon and find comfort and escape in those travel books on which I’d been raised. It was, I’ll confess, the stereotypical ennui of the overeducated, underachieving middle-class kid who suddenly finds himself, much to his confusion and dismay, in adulthood.
I also had never experienced anything like the love my parents had for each other—and still have today, I’m happy to report. Each letter bore testament to their mutual heartache of separation and ended with what is still their typical sign-off, IDLY. I Do Love You. I wanted some of that for myself. My sister had gotten married over the summer, as had my college roommate. All of my friends were pairing off, getting hitched, like normal people do. I, however, seemed to be the master of awkward dates and relationships with the life span of a fruit fly.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 1
