Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide

by Douglas S. Mack

  As we stood on the sidewalk, taking in the spectacle, trying to avoid eye contact with the cult guys, Lee said, quietly, “There.”

  Before I could ask for details, he finished his thought, his voice authoritative but tinged with mischievousness. “Pirate bar.”

  “Pirate… what?” I didn’t like where this was going.

  “Pirate bar,” he repeated. He pointed toward the forest of neon. My eyes followed his gesture and, defying my brain’s instructions to feign ignorance, settled on a flashing yellow sign that read, sure enough, “Pirate Bar.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes. We’ve gotta go there,” Lee said, striding forward.

  I composed a mental inventory of reasons why this was a bad idea, but there were so many that I didn’t know where to start listing them out loud. So I followed him.

  As we got closer, I noticed that it was surprisingly nonkitschy, which only made me more paranoid. It looked like the Amsterdam equivalent of the candy-offering strangers your mom always warned you about. Come here, little backpacker, it seemed to say. Come inside, have a drink, pay no attention to the fact that the weird skeleton out front looks nothing like a pirate and everything like that British college student who went missing last year.

  “Um, I think I’m going to veto this,” I said, then quickly added, to save face, “I mean, Arthur wouldn’t approve. It’s not in the book.”

  “We can’t say no to a pirate bar,” Lee said. “It’s a pirate bar.” As if that explained everything.

  The man could not be dissuaded, not even by my mumblings about roofies and canals and stories I’d heard from friends of friends. As we sipped our Heinekens, we looked around the room and noted that there really, seriously was no pirate theme whatsoever, aside from a bunch of bananas above the Coke dispenser, which I suppose could be construed as tropical and therefore pirate by association. Somehow, though, this minor detail only highlighted the overall sketchiness of the place. On one side of the room, there was a riser/stage area that was too small for a band but would have been just about the right size to serve as an operating table for kidney removal. Behind this, there was a scratched-up mirror that appeared very likely to be one-way. We were the only patrons but for two young women dressed in Red Light District attire, if you see what I mean.

  As I whimpered to myself, two more young women entered through the front door. Thank God, I thought. Strength in numbers. They were dressed for clubbing, in tight, ridiculous outfits and towering high heels. This pleased me not for the typical male reasons but because it meant that if all of my worst fears about this place were true, I could beat them to the door. Speaking in English accents, they ordered beers and Jägerbombs. A couple of minutes later, a few more women entered, same attire, same accent, same order.

  And then they started coming in waves: clones or sorority sisters or something, dozens of lookalike English twenty-somethings. Within ten minutes, the place was jammed beyond the fire marshal’s worst nightmare. The music started up, then cranked to maximum volume. A fog machine belched to life. Strobes and spotlights pierced the room, frenetic, urgent, disorienting. The force of the crowd slowly pushed us off our bar stools. The party had frickin’ started.

  I looked at Lee, dumbfounded. I wanted to ask him if this was his doing, if he could just snap his fingers and conjure a mob, if it was going to be like this every night. It was too loud for conversation, though, so I just mouthed, “What… the heck?”

  He smirked and shrugged. “Who cares?”

  We ordered another round, sat back, and watched the spectacle.

  Very late at night, as the room’s energy peaked, we were finally treated to a bit of pirateness. The music and the strobe lights switched off, to a series of groans from the partyers, followed by an anticipatory hush as a bell started clanging. The bartenders lit torches and poured themselves shots; a couple of them put on black tricornered pirate hats.

  The clanging got more frenzied; the crowd found its voice again, roaring as a single throbbing, delirious entity. The bartenders took deep breaths, downed their shots, brought their torches to their mouths, paused for a brief, dramatic beat… and let loose enormous, spraying, full-bodied roars, launching fireballs into the darkness.

  The place erupted. A roomful of vocal cords stretched to the max and eardrums popped like champagne corks. A barrage of elbows pummeled me as every hand shot into the air in delight. Lee looked coyly triumphant, like a magician who has just pulled off a spectacular trick for the first time and can’t believe it worked.

  In Amsterdam, I discovered that I—and my friends, as I would later point out to them all too eagerly—had been drinking beer wrong all these years. Lee, of course, already knew this. To wit: beer should be served at cellar temperature, not cold, not warm, and it specifically should have a head. If you are truly sophisticated (and the pirates, for the record, were not), you will level off the head with the flick of a tool that looks much like a frosting knife.

  I learned all of this at the Heineken Experience (“Meet the Beer. Share the Magic.”). In the 1960s, this was just the Heineken Brewery, noted in Frommer’s Readers’ Suggestions section for its straightforward but convivial atmosphere:

  The tour is very interesting and lasts about an hour and fifteen minutes. Following the tour, you return to the tap room for cheese and Heineken’s beer.… Souvenir post card folders are supplied and if you address them, Heineken stamps and mails them. The tour guide sits with the guests and the conversation is interesting and international. A worthwhile tour, and with no fee of any kind.

  My mom took that free tour and got something even cooler than “post card folders”: a mailable coaster that opened up to reveal a small booklet of photos from the brewery, along with space for a brief note.

  Alas, the mailable coasters are now gone, along with the free admission. Lee and I had to settle for an e-postcard booth, at which we selected the windmill image from the various Heineken-branded background options, posed for a photo, and emailed it to my mother. Compared to the coaster postcard, it felt impersonal and sterile—awfully modern.

  The whole experience—excuse me, Experience—was like that: technologically impressive but just not all that interesting. The room where visitors lingered the longest was the one filled with what looked like Star Trek versions of La-Z-Boys, with Heineken-green glowing sides and integrated television screens hovering above, showing the company’s ads through the decades.

  It wasn’t until we got to the World Bar—the last room before the gift shop—that I finally started to enjoy the place. We struck up conversation with Terrance, an American in the air force. We compared notes on things to do in Amsterdam—he wanted to go to the Anne Frank House; I was concerned it would have become, by now, a cheesy, high-tech attraction like the one in which we were standing—but then moved on to other topics: travel, American politics, American culture, life. Terrance pointed around the room to the other tourists he’d already talked to, people from Spain, Germany, and Dubai. I mentioned that both Mom and Frommer had also spoken of the international multitudes here, and we toasted the power of beer to bring people together.

  There was something deeper going on, though. It wasn’t just the beer that created camaraderie, it was the landmark status of this place: it’s in the guidebooks, it’s a well-known Thing to Do in Amsterdam, so it attracts a wide range of people. This, of course, is a big reason why many of us take pains to avoid “tourist traps”: they’re bursting at the seams with, well, tourists. It’s generally agreed that this is a problem. But is it really? Perhaps we need to take a page from Heineken and other corporations and, focusing on the positive, rebrand the beaten path as this: the crossroads of the world.

  If you can find some breathing room, if you can carve out a few moments of conversation—in a bar at the end of the Heineken Experience, perhaps, or on the plaza below the Basilique du Sacré Cœur, watching the City of Light begin to twinkle and glow at dusk—you might find that your fellow beaten-pat
h travelers are not tacky or awkward or boorish. Not Terrance, not Jay at Montmartre, not the family from Madrid I met by the Arc de Triomphe.

  This is the travel platitude to end all travel platitudes: it’s not about the place, it’s about the people. Agreed. So let’s not forget that even on the tourist trail—especially here, come to think of it—you can meet all kinds of people who are interesting and worldly and not at all the stereotype of the shallow sightseer. Improbable kindred spirits you would not otherwise encounter but who will be more than worth your while. And—this is important—because they are often on leave from the military or in town for a conference or just short on vacation time and planning energy, they’re precisely the sort of fascinating people who you won’t meet if you follow only the road less traveled. They’re all the more interesting precisely because they’re not jaded eternal travelers—they have full, rich lives back home, and travel serves as an icebreaker, not the entirety of the conversation. Some people mock tourists as roving bands of people who are all the same, and though there’s an ounce or two of truth to that, the reality is more complex—they may not be locals, but there’s actually a fair amount of diversity, especially at the big landmarks where everyone wants to go.

  Granted, the beaten path will not lead you to the eccentric characters who populate the year-in-a-remote-village memoirs that have become such a cliché of travel writing. You won’t encounter a lot of hobbled, grandmotherly types cloaked in oh-so-native garb. And, sure, fine: it’s a shame that you won’t meet those Authentic Individuals™.

  Truth is, though, you’re probably not going to parachute into a new culture and become fast friends with the locals. No matter how eager you are to interact with them, they probably don’t want to interact with you—they just want to go about their daily lives and not be bothered by this stranger who’s come to stare at them and mangle their language and ask to see how the Authentic Local Thing is done. Looking back on my journey so far, it struck me that, unless you’re truly charming and sociable (that is, unless you’re more like Lee than like me), it’s far easier to find conversation and camaraderie among your fellow travelers, your fellow confused outsiders, than with the quirky-authentic-traditional locals.

  Plush clog slippers: perhaps the only G-rated

  souvenirs in Amsterdam.

  And, really: most tourists are pretty damn interesting.

  I was proud of this insight. So proud. Until I got a reminder that, just as with any group consisting of more than two people, tourists are in no way a homogenous bunch. Some are affable and interesting, and some conform to every negative stereotype.

  One evening, Lee and I took shelter from the rain in a dive bar just outside the Red Light District. There were some gaunt, sallow-eyed toughs playing pool, and I have to confess to a vision of the night ending with a broken cue stick through my chest. We took our beers to the tiny basement area, which was halfheartedly decorated with retro beer posters and broken sconces. We commiserated about our writing failures and utter lack of success and fame, then started fantasizing, in jest, about a future in which we were turning down autographs and wearing sunglasses.

  A young woman gaveled a massive beer stein on the table next to Lee, then eased herself onto the adjacent stool. She had long black hair and a low-cut pink blouse.

  “We heard you talking,” she said in a clipped English accent frayed with tipsiness. Gesturing to four friends at a nearby table, she continued, “She says you were saying something about being famous. Are you famous?”

  “Well, we will be,” Lee replied, grinning. “Give us some time. A few weeks, maybe.”

  “Are you famous now?” the woman asked, apparently hoping we were just being modest.

  “Yes, you’ve discovered us,” I said. “I’m Brad Pitt and this is George Clooney.”

  She was not amused; her face became a mask of derision and disappointment. I could almost hear her thinking, “Fuck you for not being celebrities. I walked all the way over here and you can’t even be some C-list reality TV stars or obscure indie rockers?”

  Lee and I, however, were amused and willing to continue the conversation, if only to see how petulant she would become. They were from outside of London (“You wouldn’t recognize the name of the town”) and had come here just for a long weekend to celebrate our new nonfriend’s birthday.

  “Wait, you flew to Amsterdam just for the weekend, for a birthday party?” Lee asked.

  They gave us blank looks, apparently trying to figure out if we really had asked such a stupid question.

  “Um, yeah,” one said, finally, tactfully leaving out the “duh.”

  “But… why Amsterdam?” Lee asked.

  The five answered in gleeful, drunken unison: “To get fucked up!”

  I tried to imagine my mother as part of this group. She had been about their age. Would she have fit in with them? Would the European culture of her era have allowed women to express such a sentiment? I would have said no to both of these questions. Absolutely not. Nice, wholesome women from Minnesota wouldn’t do that sort of thing in the ’60s—even latent hippies like Mom. Her postcards to Dad may have mentioned touring museums with other men, but there was nothing about any late-night carousing. Her postcards to her sister, however… well, they painted a different picture: “Went to 2 student clubs last nite,” she wrote from Amsterdam. “Went to bed at 4:30 AM.” She went on to offer her hangover cure, a large glass of milk. This was information that I didn’t know how to begin processing, in its own way as jarring as it would have been to find a photo of her dancing on a bar with a lampshade on her head. (Unfortunately, or perhaps not, all of her photos from the trip have disappeared.) Maybe things hadn’t changed that much, after all.

  Our inebriated interrogator’s spirit dropped another notch when we said we were writers—the lowest of the noncelebrities. I brought out Europe on Five Dollars a Day and she inadvertently tore the cover half off as she pawed through it.

  “Easy there,” I muttered.

  “So will we be in your book?” she asked as she drained her beer.

  “You haven’t been interesting enough,” Lee said brightly.

  “Just mention the drunk girl in Amsterdam,” came the slurred reply.

  “Let’s go see a sex show,” her friend said. I’m not sure if it was a sincere suggestion or just the first excuse she could think of to ditch these noncelebrities. They headed out with half waves, leaving us once again anonymous and at peace.

  Well, Drunk Girl in Amsterdam, you made it in after all. Because you—as well as your compatriots at the Pirate Bar, who we eventually figured out were all part of a group trip—are an excellent case study in this truth of modern travel: as going abroad has become easier, people do it for ever-sillier reasons and ever-shorter lengths of time. At this rate, we’ll soon be teleporting around the world just to pick up sandwich ingredients.

  I’d like to point out, once again, that we were in a bar, drinking beer (that is, not in a coffee shop consuming other items). Last I checked, England had bars. Rather a lot. But it was cheaper and easier, Drunk Girl said, not to mention more exotic, to come here than to spend a weekend in London or take the train up to Edinburgh. There were a variety of modern-day factors that made this possible: the European Union’s open borders, the ease of booking plane tickets and hotel rooms online, and the flat-out low costs of getting here.

  They’d flown over on one of the discount airlines like Ryanair and easyJet, the game changers for intra-European travel since the mid-1990s. These are “no-frills” airlines, which is a kinder way of saying, “Think of the most dismal bus on which you have ridden, and then imagine it thirty thousand feet up.” (Even the airports they serve often have a forlorn bus station vibe, far-flung and austere.) There’s just one selling point, but it’s the crucial one: prices that even a 1960s backpacker would find astonishingly cheap, often well under a hundred dollars (plus various fees, which can add up quickly).

  Once you’re on the Continent today,
your funds might not stretch as far as my mother’s (five dollars then would be equivalent to nearly thirty-four dollars in 2011; good luck using that as your daily budget), but, interestingly, it costs a lot less to get there in the first place, even if you’re traveling all the way across the Atlantic. That’s true not just in inflation-adjusted figures but often in real dollars. According to my copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, in 1963, an economy-class round-trip airplane ticket from New York to Rome cost $620.30 (more than $4,400 in 2011 dollars). At the time, all the major airlines charged precisely the same price, because they were all part of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which set the fares. (Credit the U.S. Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 with ending this practice.) There was one exception: Icelandair—my mother’s choice—which wasn’t part of the alliance and undercut its competitors by about a hundred dollars and sold only tourist-class fares, although you did have to go through Reykjavík.

  I’m not quite ready to call today the golden age of travel, but in many ways it’s a heck of a lot easier, safer, faster, and even cheaper to go wherever you want, on your own terms, no travel agent or elaborate planning necessary. The world is open; the options for escape ever-expanding. They might not always be luxurious, but they’re egalitarian, more so every day—and that’s the point, the one that Arthur Frommer was trying to make.

  Lee had coined a verb: “Frommering.” It was his name for the scavenger hunt I led him on all over town in search of my guidebook’s recommendations. And the Frommering, as it happened, was not going well, even though we were walking six to eight miles a day, we guessed, in our search. Whenever we found ourselves frustrated and hungry at the door of a tobacco shop or row house that had once been an enchanting bistro, we relied on what Lee called “the Goddess Serendipity” and picked a restaurant or thing to do at random. I had a different, more guilt-wracked term for this: “cheating on Arthur.”