I pointed again, but my hands were shaking so much that even if he understood what I was trying to say, and even if he could read English, there’s no way he could have made out any of the text.
My better instincts took over. I trudged to the ticket window and opened my wallet.
By design, Europe on Five Dollars a Day was not an all-purpose, everything-you-might-need-to-know sort of book like many of its contemporaries and nearly all of its successors. For one thing, it covered significantly less territory than its major competitors—just twelve cities in the original 1957 edition: full chapters for London, Paris, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Nice, plus a page or two each for Berlin, Madrid, Athens, and Copenhagen. Established cultural capitals all, but one can’t help but wonder if Frommer helped solidify their place in the Grand Tourist’s itinerary, if he helped make this specific path so beaten—especially since, by comparison, a 1957 Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe contained chapters for twenty-five separate countries, and a 1960 Fodor’s Jet Age Guide to Europe had thirty-three. Both included much of eastern Europe and featured substantial information on cities and regions that are essentially unknown to tourists even today. Both were also rather overwhelming in the history, background, and commentary they offered in page after page—about eight hundred each—of tiny type.
Frommer’s book was in a different spirit: just the essentials. He offered details on how to read a train table, where to shop, what exchange rates to expect (because, of course, prior to the introduction of the euro in 2002, each country had its own currency), and a brief selection of phrases in various languages, a key element that those Fielding’s and Fodor’s books lacked. That was about it.
There were few of the modern guidebooks’ protean tips and tricks on, for example, how to use local transit systems; how to dress in various cultures; etiquette and taboos; tipping; pickup lines for captivatingly lovely signorine in Florence; how to call, mail, or otherwise keep in touch with the folks back home; or that eternal anxiety of travel, avoiding being scammed, mugged, or straight-up killed. Frommer intended his book to be essentially a supplement to other guides, so he intentionally limited its scope to focus on where to stay and where to eat. (By the late 1960s, the book would include sightseeing sections written by Frommer’s wife, Hope, after she insisted that he had to offer more of this information.)
Frommer said nothing, for example, about what to see at the Louvre. Obviously, I could have enjoyed the museum despite the lack of guidance from Frommer about where to go and what to see. Or I could have followed the masses carrying a different variety of offbeat guidebook, one with a Da Vinci Code theme. But this is not the place to go if you’re sick of looking at art and dealing with crowds. Really, seriously, not the place. I glanced through my mother’s postcards, hoping for another opportunity for a scavenger hunt, but all I found were comments about being more impressed with the building than the art it housed. I had to agree. I made a quick circuit and left, opting for the vastly more entertaining spectacle a ways up the Champs-Élysées: the vehicular free-for-all where twelve streets converge at the Arc de Triomphe, where the traffic jam is every bit as eternal as the flame beneath the monument. E5D won’t tell you this, and modern guidebooks probably won’t, either, but this is, hands down, the best free entertainment in Paris. I spent half an hour watching the spectacle with a family from Madrid, trading quips on the mayhem in my mediocre Spanish.
Thirty seconds after I savored this view and
took this photo, the skies opened up and I got
drenched by a torrential downpour.
Because my own guidebook did not always provide me with the necessary details, I was often forced to rely on the kindness of people who, at most other points in life, I would go to extreme measures to avoid. For the subways, this was—on multiple occasions—groups of chattering English girls, about twelve or thirteen years old, sans chaperone. One of those times was now, as I tried to find my way from the Arc de Triomphe to a Frommer-approved restaurant on the Left Bank.
I stood in front of a map on the Métro wall, trying to make sense of the tangled lines and minuscule text. I suppose I looked like a cartoon version of a clueless tourist: jaw slightly agape with befuddlement, eyes wide and panicked, hands fidgeting nervously. At my moment of maximum confusion, this group walked by, stopped their preteen prattling, and stared with amusement before one of them asked, with the sort of chipper sneer that only a tween can pull off, “You lost?”
Of course I was lost. I couldn’t find my destination on the subway map, in large part because I didn’t know where it was on a street map, since the only one I had was, yes, the little hand-drawn number from my 1963 guidebook. Pride, however, forced me to stammer out a reassurance: “No, no… I’m okay, thanks.”
The girl rolled her eyes, unconvinced. After a long moment, I confessed that, well, actually, I wasn’t quite entirely sure how to get where I was trying to go—it was a neighborhood quite a ways off, and I was new here, but that’s okay, I didn’t expect her to know where it was, either, thanks anyway. Cue another eye roll. Then, flashing an orthodontia-adorned pitying smirk, she took a deep breath and launched into her directions, which went something like this: “Okay, you go down these stairs, and you get on the number 1 train, toward Château de Vincennes—that’s the last station on the line, not your stop. Get off at Châtelet. Then you transfer to the number 4 and take it to Saint-Michel. Follow the signs to the exit by the fountain—it’ll say that, ‘the fountain’—and then go down the Boulevard Saint-Michel two blocks, just past the pizza shop, which I quite like, and take a left. It should be just round the corner. Simple, really.”
“Um. Okay.” Her instructions turned out to be dead-on, and I soon found myself at the appointed address. Which was now a McDonald’s.
One of the few areas where Frommer gave advice beyond stay-here-eat-there was what to pack, which provides an interesting insight into how his entire approach to travel differed from that of Temple Fielding and other guidebook writers of the era.
In 1968, John McPhee profiled Fielding for the New Yorker. This is a partial inventory of the clothes Fielding took on his five-month tours of Europe:
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.
When you dress like that, when you do everything in your power to seem like a moneyed dandy straight out of central casting, you are also required to have luggage full of absurd, nonessential items. Fielding did not disappoint. To get around baggage fees—a headache even back then—he carried a raffia basket (the airlines didn’t know how to classify it, so they essentially just ignored it; try that on your next trip). Its contents included “a bottle of maraschino cherries, a bottle of Angostura bitters, 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.” He also had a calfskin briefcase that he designed himself and whose copious compartments held another forty-one items, including bottles of brandy and Johnnie Walker, a yodeling alarm clock, plus more standard items like toothbrushes and notebooks.
If you’re keeping count, that’s two suitcases, one massive raffia basket, and a briefcase. This was the classic mentality of travel: pack everything you need or want, all the comforts of home aside from your actual home itself.
What we have between Fielding and Frommer is a generation gap even more profound than the one that exists between Frommer and today’s Lonely Planet–toting backpackers. Frommer’s wife, Hope, wrote the packing chapter for E5D, and her advice was much like what you’ll read in today’s guides: pack as lig
htly as possible, the absolute essentials only. “A light suitcase means freedom.” Roll—don’t fold—your clothes. And don’t worry about forgetting things—you can buy anything you need in Europe. They have stores there. And the food and water are safe, so don’t take your own.
For men, this was Hope’s 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 thirty-five]
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!
That sounds a lot more manageable than Fielding’s list. (Though, to be fair, Fielding’s guidebooks did not recommend the same amount of gratuitous baggage that the man himself carried.)
Of course, to the modern reader, even Hope’s list still feels a bit long (both a tweed sports jacket and a suit?!). Conventional wisdom among today’s frugal travelers is to carry only a small daypack, to pack as though you were fleeing the country in the middle of the night and needed to escape with the barest necessities, and to make all of your attire multitask, suitable for nightclubs and business meetings and mountain climbing. (Good luck with that.) Utility trumps comfort, today’s serious travelers seem to agree, and if something serves only one purpose or won’t be used every minute of every day, it has no place in your backpack. Travel’s better when you’re kinda miserable—the road to enlightenment is paved with minimalist discomfort.
In my own packing, I had tried to find a happy medium: just one pair of shoes but five shirts, mostly cotton, which might not pack as small or dry as quickly as some other materials but feels a heck of a lot better. Zero suits, zero handkerchiefs.
Packing light, though, means having to do laundry all the time and makes for its own version of wretchedness if you keep putting off the task. While digging for something in the bottom of my backpack that night, I felt an unfamiliar package wrapped in plastic. I pulled it out, opened it up, and instantly wished I hadn’t. It was my shirt and boxer shorts from that rain-drenched museum day in Florence, still damp and more odoriferous than the runniest, stinkiest French cheese. When you’re on the road, living out of a backpack, you have to shift your hygiene standards downward a bit, but this was outside even my adjusted parameters of acceptability. I was tempted to throw them out the window, onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel, but that seemed likely to set back French-American relations at least a decade. So I filled the sink with hot water, dumped in the detergent and the clothes, and got to work.
It made me glad, once more, to be a tourist in modern times, in an era of fast-drying synthetics and, best of all, lowered expectations of formality. I like not having to pack even a single suit. Mind you, I wasn’t wearing T-shirts and flip-flops—I was doing my best to blend in, with a plain but marginally classy wardrobe. (And, incidentally, I noticed my fellow Americans doing the same—the stereotypically informal, boorish Americans had given way to circumspect, well-attired ones. Good job, team.) For example, I wore only black socks, because I had heard that white ones were the classic sign of the American tourist. Black ones, though—those’ll fool ’em. I suppose I hoped the European locals’ conversation would go something like this:
PIERRE: Ha! Look at that tourist with his camera and guidebook!
JACQUES: Wait, but observe his socks! They are… black!
PIERRE: Zut alors! You are correct! He is one of us! What a fool I am! Let us go speak to him in English and invite him to lunch!
I finished my load of sink laundry and hung my clothes up to dry on the bungee-cord clothesline I had strung across the bathroom. There were suction cups on either end, but they gave way immediately, my clothes tumbling to the tile floor with a wet, emphatic thwump. I put it back up more carefully, rehung the clothes, and gave a fruitless pass at pressing out the wrinkles with my hands.
I needed to look at least semipresentable the next day. I was headed to a classic Parisian bistro where no tourists ever went. Maybe I should have brought a suit along after all.
Although Frommer says it’s the Left Bank where you’ll find what remains of authentic Paris, he has one major find on the Right Bank, to which he devotes nearly an entire page of praise: a locals-only gem called Le Grand Colbert. It’s “the cheapest restaurant of Paris,” he says, and
It is the oddest restaurant in the world, and the only explanation I’ve conceived for it is that it exists primarily to serve the clerks and secretaries of the Paris “Bourse” (Stock Exchange), which is located one long avenue block away. The most amazing thing about the Colbert is that it has a huge, gilded interior, straight out of the era of Toulouse-Lautrec.… Paper tablecloths only, terribly crowded, get there at 1 p.m. to miss the heaviest lunch-time rush.
As instructed, I arrived around 1 p.m. When I peeked in the window, I could see that the interior was every bit as magnificent as advertised, with high ceilings framed by elaborate crown molding and seemingly acres of wooden booths. There was a menu in the window, listing classic bistro fare plus a few nods to our globalized age, including “lamb stew curry style with basmati rice.” Nearly everything was over twenty euros—so much for “cheapest restaurant of Paris.” I nervously fingered the fifty-euro note in my pocket, which was supposed to last me a couple of days more.
There was something far more remarkable in one of the other windows: a movie poster for the Jack Nicholson–Diane Keaton romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give. An article from the Australian accompanied the poster. Its headline read, “Star brasserie can’t stop counting its chickens.” I skimmed the first paragraph and figured out the gist: a key scene of the movie was filmed at Le Grand Colbert, and tourists had been flocking there ever since—so much, too, for being a hidden, locals-only spot.
I was hungry, so I took a photo of the article, intending to peruse the rest later. I glanced at my reflection in the window and hastily combed my hair with my fingers, then took a deep breath and walked inside. I was greeted by a ferret of a maître d’, who visibly recoiled at the sight of me. I silently translated what he was thinking: Merde. Another American who saw that movie. I was suddenly acutely aware that I was a disheveled backpacker who didn’t belong here, even in spite of my clean, if rumpled, shirt and finger-combed hair. The maître d’ beckoned, turned, and walked purposefully as he led me to a table away from the rest of the dwindling lunch crowd, as though quarantining me.
The waitress presented me with a menu, and I scanned it for something at least marginally in line with my budget and general culinary cowardice. Aha: roasted chicken. Sounds good. Serve it quick and get me out of here, s’il vous plaît. It arrived with a little dish of pommes frites, even though I didn’t order them—the menu had them as a side dish, five euros. For a moment, I thought, Awesome, free food! Maybe this place wasn’t so bad. Or maybe—my anxiety kicked in, full force—it was more plausible that they were going to charge me double, triple, quintuple, as part of one of those “mess with the tourists” hustles that modern guidebooks warn you about, but Frommer did not. I lightly touched the fifty-euro note again, then pulled my camera out of my bag. I scrolled through my recent photos as I chewed my chicken—which was actually quite tasty, I should note, the herb rub and tender meat perfectly balanced.
I stopped on the photo of the article in the window and zoomed in to read the text.
My jaw froze midmastication, then fell as I read. The star of the story was the maît
re d’, outspoken in his annoyance with tourists and especially tired of those who “ring up and want to book the table Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton ate at.” No, I thought, recalling his quarantining. Surely he hadn’t… Weeks later, at home, I tracked down a copy of the movie and watched it in a panic and found my answer: Yes. That’s where he sat me. The Annoying American Table.
My last morning in Paris, I sat by the Seine, ate a
croissant, and became a tourist attraction myself,
waving to the tour boats passing by.
I kept reading the blurry text on my camera and learned that the staff was also sick of everyone always ordering the same meal as the stars: roast chicken. With a side of pommes frites.
I wasn’t just a disheveled backpacker and a stereotypical American tourist, which was bad enough. On top of that, I was a full-on Diane Keaton groupie, a Jack Nicholson stalker, a glazed-eyed, hard-core romantic-comedy obsessive.
The server walked by, intentionally looking away as she passed.
I strongly considered hiding under the table. Part of me wanted to call out, “No, you don’t understand! I’m not one of them! Sacré bleu! What a misunderstanding! I am a journalist! A scholar! A tourist reenactor—not a real one.” Somehow, though, I wasn’t sure that pulling out my 1963 guidebook would be compelling evidence of my normalness and lack of bizarre obsessions.
“Arthur,” I muttered, “what are you doing to me?”
My eyes darted around the room, taking in every detail, trying to distract myself from the queasiness settling into my gut. No wonder Hollywood had come calling. This place was perfect Paris, no soundstage necessary. The hydralike Beaux Arts light fixtures. The jazz concert posters behind the bar. The palm trees in massive azure urns.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 6
