Every time my gaze crossed paths with the bartender’s, I noticed that he was staring at me with an unsettling mixture of confusion and contempt. I tried to focus on my food and reassure myself that I was imagining things, unfairly projecting on this guy the famous French snootiness that I still had yet to experience. He’s just staring off into space, I told myself. He’s bored. He’s, you know, pondering Sartre or something. I glanced back at him for confirmation. Oh, God. No. He really was staring—glowering—at me. I pulled out my notebook and spent the rest of the meal doodling and jotting down random observations, my best pensive expression on my face, my eyes fixed on the page, certain that if I looked up, I’d find an entire row of Parisians leering, smirking. Maybe if I kept doing this, I told myself, my ruminative countenance would prove to him that I was, truly, not just another tourist but an incognito philosopher who had taken a stroll over from the Sorbonne for lunch. Maybe my black leather Moleskine—notebook of Hemingway and Chatwin—would win him over.
I recalled that Jack Nicholson had also played an addled writer in one of his more famous roles, in The Shining. My blank page, like his, was my curse; filling it was my obsession. I was running out of room in the notebook, but I vowed my pen wouldn’t stop until the bill arrived. I wrote in the margins, my text running sideways, filling in gaps, becoming ever smaller.
“Just gonna keep writing and not look up,” says one line. “’Cause this sucks.”
This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks. This sucks.
My mother’s trip to Paris was also not going according to plan. She and Ann had a new, unexpected traveling companion: Terry, Ann’s boyfriend from back in the States. He met them in Nice and proposed to Ann there; the three of them continued on to Paris together. A sign of their rock-bottom budget: even after that, they all shared a room. Awkward for everyone, for obvious reasons, and the new circumstances only made my mother miss her own fiancé even more.
Lack of time alone was not among my own problems. I had Arthur Frommer along as my imaginary traveling companion, but talking to him was getting old. The boar in Florence was really not working its magic. E5D wasn’t helping. And I wasn’t doing myself any favors, either, channeling my inner, mopey existentialist and spending inordinate amounts of time sitting in parks, eating pastries, and writing in my notebook.
A few blocks from Le Grand Colbert, I passed the open doorway of an office building. There was a young woman, about my age, leaning idly against the door frame. As I walked by, we made eye contact for a split second and the weirdest thing happened: her face absolutely lit up in a delighted, startled smile.
Wow, I thought. You’ll never get that greeting again. If ever there were a time to strike up conversation with a random stranger, this is it.
She looked exactly like that woman from the movie Amélie, with short black hair and a coy sparkle in her eyes. Of course. When a young man who likes to think of himself as worldly and bookish and quirky is in Paris and falls in love at first sight, this is the natural reference point: Amélie.
I realize that I am not the first person with delusions of living a romantic-comedy life filled with meet-cute moments and a soundtrack of melancholy indie rock ballads. You could blame Jack and Diane and Le Grand Colbert for putting me in the mindset just now, but the truth is, these flights of fancy are fairly common for me when I’m abroad, where everything is unfamiliar and therefore unreal—like I’m the mild-mannered protagonist wandering through the set. If I keep following the script, everything will turn out just like in the movies.
I absolutely swear, though, that this was not infatuated self-deception but fact: she looked just like Amélie. I imagined our courtship: moonlit strolls along the Seine, picnics in the Jardin du Luxembourg. A brief, narrative-enhancing spat about philosophy or croissants. Our wedding in a little chapel overlooking the lavender fields of Provence. Our adorable mop-headed, bilingual children. The movie based on our story, debuting to critical accolades at Sundance—casting her role would be too easy.
I returned the smile, the gaze.
And…
And I kept walking. Such was my frustration and self-loathing, and my certainty that my tourist status and the language barrier would immediately kill the conversation. This is what happens when a romantic fool is also a pragmatic, coldhearted cynic: head overrules heart. Life’s not a movie, I reminded myself, although I could swear I heard the Sundance audience groaning in frustration. After three minutes of wondering, “What would Arthur do?” and admonishing myself—seriously, you’re never going to get a first-glance smile like that again—I doubled back. She was gone. I peered inside the doorway and saw not a soul.
My mother’s turning point in Paris came when she hopped on a train and got out of town alone. She kept riding until something looked interesting, getting off at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps. She wandered for hours, toured a cathedral, ate crepes, enjoyed her newfound solitude. When she returned to Paris and met back up with Ann and Terry, she was refreshed. They went to a restaurant recommended by a friend, she reported in a letter on the back of a museum ticket, her paper supply and money running low but her spirits sky-high. “We got here an hour before it opens so the owner invited us in… and is now playing the guitar—atmosphere plus.” They stayed for nearly five hours.
For me, the event that reinstilled my touristic sense of wonder was the Parade for Sex and Beer. I don’t know if that was the official name, but it was definitely the theme. Champagne and wine were also involved, plus college students in diapers and baby bonnets.
It was… well, somewhere on the Right Bank. I was lost again. In the distance, perhaps a block away, I heard the distinctive sound of a marching band—something I associate with small-town parades in the United States, not capital cities abroad. I peered down the street and saw, sure enough, a band of perhaps thirty members. They were not especially tuneful or well organized, the rows far from precise, the marching more of a lackadaisical amble. Each musician wore a brightly colored T-shirt and a matching Afro wig.
Behind them came the floats. If the guys from Animal House got together with some Dadaists, this would be the result: a car with an enormous papier-mâché pretzel affixed to the top, another with a fifty-gallon wine bottle pouring into a glass on the hood, and other vehicles transformed, with sheets and paint and various accessories, into a tropical jungle, a yellow submarine, and what was either a cremation urn or a teapot. Interspersed throughout were trucks with bands and gyrating dancers.
Were they celebrating something? Advertising something? Had Frommer contrived to set this up to boost my spirits? I had no idea. When one of the diaper-wearing students tried to hand me a flyer, I declined—I didn’t want to know what this was all about. Ill-informed speculation was more fun.
I had less than twenty-four hours left on this trip, and suddenly I realized how boring my life was about to become again. Constraints of budget and lack of vacation time were forcing me to return to my mundane reality, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. For the past eight whirlwind days, I had been waking up each morning with no real plans and in a setting almost entirely unfamiliar to me. My brain was always on, working to keep up, confronted with new problems and puzzles at every turn—I was using it far more than I did back at the office, writing memos and cursing at the ornery printer. Even the most frustrating moments—like lunch at Le Grand Colbert—had turned out to be eye-opening or hilarious in retrospect.
At my hotel, I struck up a conversation with the desk clerk, a Parisian version of a burned-out California surfer dude. He guffawed loudly when I showed him my old guidebook. “I have not heard of this. Impossible! Maybe five hundred dollars a day. Is this what it should say?”
He read aloud, “Right on the Boulevard
St. Michel, the big Hotel de Suez is the outstanding choice for readers who don’t mind a fair amount of noise from the strollers below.” Here he paused and gave the shrug-plus-head-tilt that I had come to think of as the French way of saying “Yes, it is true, and it is unfortunate. But… whatever, dude.” He knew that I was in a street-side room and that the noise had only gotten worse.
I showed him Frommer’s descriptions of other hotels and restaurants in the neighborhood, and he started rattling off details. This closed years ago; this he had not heard of; this was still around but bore little resemblance to Frommer’s description. He was doing my work for me, sparing me the chore of the hunt.
“It’s okay,” I said, stopping him. “I want to go look for myself.”
One of the few landmarks that Frommer does recommend in Europe on Five Dollars a Day is Montmartre. I initially skimmed past it when reading, because the listing is buried in a one-paragraph-long synopsis of some things to do. This is the entire description: “Montmartre, at dusk.” Nothing about where it is or why I’d want to go there.
I should note here that my willful ignorance was not a put-on. I had made a genuine effort not to know anything about anywhere before I left home, and my general foolishness needs no embellishments. I say this because, apparently, Montmartre is a Well-Known Thing. I’m guessing that’s why Frommer felt no need to give any details aside from saying, yeah, it’s worth seeing—just as his entire listing for a certain other famous landmark reads, simply, “The Eiffel Tower, of course.” I’m sure I’d heard of Montmartre before, but the specifics never stuck in my mind.
But I overheard some other tourists comparing notes and mentioning plans to go there, so I figured maybe it was worth checking out. My last night, I took the train to Montmartre just before sunset, then followed the signs and the crowds trekking up the immense hill that appeared in front of me. At the summit, a sweep of stairs led up to a towering cathedral, resplendent in white travertine stone and hauntingly elegant in its symmetry and restrained detailing. The Basilique du Sacré Cœur. Another set of stairs led down to an open terrace, where a few dozen people were scattered about, in groups and alone. Some were eating a picnic supper; some were just chatting; six or seven kids played keep-away with a soccer ball. Everyone subtly nodded to the beats competing from across the plaza: a teenager’s tinny boom box and a pair of drummers banging on bongos.
The real attraction, the focus of everyone’s attention, was the expanse beyond and below the terrace: the city of Paris, sprawling to the horizon, as though presented on a massive platter for my own personal enjoyment.
Incroyable. I walked down the steps, not blinking, barely breathing, spellbound. I dodged a misfired pass from the soccer game and leaned against the railing at the edge of the hill.
I was glad I hadn’t known about this beforehand. If I’d stuck to my usual method of overpreparation, I would have read all the details about this place, this view. I would have seen the professional photos. I would have heard the dissenting voices bemoaning the crowds and those pesky kids with their soccer ball. I would have been, I am sure, disappointed. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially in travel, where surprise and wonder and discovering the new are pretty much the entire reason for the endeavor. Never in my life have I been so grateful for being so ill informed.
Thank you, Arthur. You were right: Paris is rejuvenating.
I turned around to watch the crowd on the steps and saw a man walking toward me. I pulled my camera from my bag. “Excusez-moi?” I said, trying to remember the word for “photo.”
He chuckled, “I was about to ask you the same thing!” He tugged his own tiny camera from his pocket.
We took each other’s photos and got to chatting as the light started to fade. His name was Jay; he was a business executive from Philadelphia in town for a conference. Tall guy, athletic, confident, looked a bit like a young Colin Powell.
“I didn’t know much about this place, either,” he said, “but everyone said you gotta go there, gotta go there. So last night I came up here, and it’s… amazing. I’m going home tomorrow, but I had to come back one more time.”
In a few minutes, we would watch as the City of Light earned its reputation, with a scattering of far-flung flickers leading the way, followed by luminous bursts as the streetlamps switched on, coordinating with the glow spilling from cafés and apartments to make art of the sprawling grid. Jay and I would keep talking, exchange business cards, and promise to keep in touch.
But for now, it was the transition that captivated us, silencing our conversation. So this is why you go to Montmartre at dusk: to watch from above as the setting sun bathes Paris in saffron hues, then rose, seeming to spotlight only the most magnificent features and hide the rest in shadows—never mind those bits. Never mind your worries. Enjoy this moment while it lasts.
*That’s according to a Time article in 1963. Nora Ephron’s 1967 New York Times profile of Arthur put it at twenty thousand, and in his interview for A Sense of Place, the man himself gives a figure of five thousand. I’m inclined to trust the Time number, being the middle amount and the earliest reference, but in any event, there were soon more printings.
Amsterdam
Live and Let Live It Up
Amsterdam is a swinging town.
—Europe on Five Dollars a Day
A year passed. A year in which I grew ever more weary of my job and my life; a year in which my health took a major turn for the worse; a year in which, most of all, I couldn’t get Montmartre out of my mind. Now and then, I revisited my parents’ letters, always finding myself lingering over one of the last ones my father sent to Europe:
After working all day and lots of yesterday and all, I just had to get OUT, so at about 1:00 AM I just did. The night is clear, calm, and cold—so silent you can hear for miles. The crunch of snow and the sound of an occasional car blocks away only help to bring out how quiet it is.… And I thought about travel and decided that I would hop a freight train tonight if I did not have other responsibilities and desires which I consider—for some unknown reason—to be more ? But I almost did. I.e.—I’m getting itchy feet.
One midsummer day, as I mowed my parents’ lawn while they were in Scotland—yet again—my own itchy feet became unbearable.
I booked a ticket.
I would leave in a month for six weeks on the Continent. Going to all fifteen cities left in the book wasn’t feasible, not unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life eating only Fancy Feast Florentine cat food. So I drew up a list using various criteria: ease of access between cities (sorry, Athens), general sense of what had changed the most in forty years (guten Tag, Berlin), and random whim. My itinerary: Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Venice, Rome, and Madrid.
This time, I would have company.
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. He would join me for the first five cities.
“If I do my job,” Lee said in an email before we left the United States, “you will be fully glad to be rid of me when I leave.” The words filled me with both excitement and dread in equal measure, more so the latter when we decided that we would meet in Amsterdam, a rather famously good place to get into trouble.
As Arthur Frommer puts it in his opening line about the city, “Amsterd
am is a swinging town.” It’s a word choice that invites knowing snickers and raised eyebrows from the modern reader: Oh, really, Arthur? What do you mean by “swinging,” exactly?
What he meant, I hasten to note, is not the sort of true debauchery that we now associate with Amsterdam. The city’s famous coffee shops (meaning, wink, wink: marijuana shops) came to prominence only after the Dutch parliament decriminalized pot in 1976—nearly twenty years after Europe on Five Dollars a Day was first published—and Frommer gives the Red Light District the most cursory of mentions. It’s nothing at all like the 1999 guidebook I found at my local library, Get Lost: The Cool Guide to Amsterdam, which features entire chapters on where to find primo weed and the best live sex shows (“I especially liked one couple who did a choreographed routine to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’”). No, Frommer’s “swinging” was a lot more banal—burlesque and booze were as scandalous as he got.
Before we continue, let’s have a quick by-the-numbers establishing of some key facts:
Total number of drinks I had consumed during the Florence-Paris part of my Not-So-Grand Tour: zero
Times in my life, ever, that I had been barhopping (as in, you know, patronizing multiple bars in a single evening): not a one
You’ll understand my alarm, then, when just a few hours after Lee arrived, we were wandering the streets in search of our—count ’em—fourth bar of the evening. We were in the southern part of town, in a bustling commercial and entertainment district, all neon signs and blaring music. The people-watching was spectacular: tourists of all types and all nationalities staring at each other in wonder and disgust; a guy who spoke in a hilariously sinister stage whisper, offering to sell us drugs (“I got the reeeal deeal”); and a loitering group of men in their early twenties, all vacant eyed and creepily dapper in tight jeans, black sport coats, black ties, and necklaces with vaguely New Age amulets—they looked like a cult awaiting the arrival of a charismatic leader.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 7
