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

by Douglas S. Mack

  One place that is definitely still around is the Red Light District, which, as I say, Frommer mentions only fleetingly, in the final entry of the Readers’ Suggestions section: “A walk through Amsterdam’s Red Light district is unbelievable.” Like Drunk Girl’s friends, Lee and I wanted to see it for ourselves, if only to check it off the list.

  And it is still unbelievable—but not in the way that you’d expect. Just the opposite: the area really is not as seedy as you might think, at least during a normal person’s waking hours. We went at dusk the next day, and the first thing we saw was an older couple out for an evening constitutional, licking ice cream cones, taking in the scene. Most everyone, it appeared, came here purely for the people-watching, eyeing the other tourists and, if they were anything like me and Lee, quietly making bets about who would actually enter the well-kept, neon-signed, mall-store-looking dens of iniquities around us. Few did. We peered into the offices of what appeared to be a design firm, spotting a meeting of executives in a conference room that shared a wall with a brothel. A friend of mine later told me that when he was here, he’d seen a large group of people, men and women, crowded around the picture window of one of the brothels. Curious, he peered through the scrum, expecting to see a sex show or something similarly risqué. In fact, they were watching the World Cup.

  There was one place that I knew was still open but had been avoiding, particularly in light of the over-the-top cheesiness of the Heineken Experience and the fact that much of central Amsterdam seemed to have become an amusement park with a libertarian theme, all souvenir stands and head shops and museums of vice (literally: our hotel was in the same block as the Sex Museum and the Vodka Museum, and walking distance to the Marijuana Museum).

  If ever there were a place that should not be turned into a proper-noun Experience or Attraction, this is it: the Anne Frank House.

  It merits its own section in Europe on Five Dollars a Day, under the heading “The Unforgettable.” Frommer calls the effect of visiting “searing, heartbreaking, infuriating beyond belief,” then adds, “Let none of us ever pass through Amsterdam without making a pilgrimage to the Anne Frank House.”

  But Lee and I had seen the line—out the door, down the block. And we’d seen the people posing in front of the house with wide grins, casually leaning on the doorway like it was Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. As I’d told Terrance at the Heineken Experience, no matter how serious the subject matter, this seemed to be just another overrun, tacky tourist trap—a place to visit not out of any sense of moral or historic duty, but because you saw it listed in one of those books with titles like 1,000 Things You Absolutely, Positively Must Do Before You Die, Unless You’re a Total Loser. There might even be an animatronic Anne. I shuddered at the thought.

  Still, we felt obligated to visit, if only because Frommer said we must.

  The young Brits in front of us in line played right into our expectations. There were four of them, all women in their early twenties, all exceptionally loud. They would have gotten along well with Drunk Girl. As they dug hungrily into a bag of potato chips, they exchanged ever-wilder stories of excess and debauchery in bars around the world and coffee shops here in Amsterdam. One woman was particularly quick with the titillating tales. She had bleached blond hair, saucer-sized sunglasses, an astonishing amount of makeup, flip-flops, and a tight black outfit that left little to the imagination. She was, I thought, the very archetype of the obnoxious, indiscreet tourist.

  As we neared the entrance, Lee suppressed a snicker and said, “I bet there’ll be some precious comments inside the museum, too.”

  Inside, though, the crowds were too hushed for eavesdropping. Oh, I tried, particularly when I could tell from my fellow visitors’ amused looks that their comments were not exactly reverential. But as we moved through the lower part of the building, took in the various museum displays, and edged closer to the upstairs annex where the Frank family hid, the collective mood became more solemn and uneasy.

  So did my own.

  By the time I climbed the staircase beyond the famous bookshelf, all the snark had drained from my body. I felt less like a visitor in a museum and more like an inadvertent trespasser in someone’s home. History had come alive in the most unsettling way.

  There was one sight that literally stopped me in my tracks: a line from Anne’s diary, dated December 24, 1943, and now printed on the wall: “I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free.”

  Reading that quote in the midst of my own six-week, transcontinental backpacking trip—a journey that was, essentially, an expression of freedom and youth—was a jarring reminder that life is not like this for everyone, not an endless stream of discoveries and delights.

  For us tourists, the Anne Frank House is a destination to be checked off and posed in front of before we head on to the Heineken Experience or the Van Gogh Museum—it’s a place of momentary interest in our journeys.

  For Anne—and, more to the point, for way too many other nameless, forgotten individuals, then and now—travel wasn’t an option, not even a dash across the street. Home was prison. It’s this fact that makes the Anne Frank House so uniquely discomfiting: it is eerily familiar. We can identify with this family, this apartment. In this context, mundane details gain deeper resonance, like the section of wall with markings measuring the heights of Anne and her sister, Margot, tracking their growth and potential but also the passing and loss of their youth.

  These are the details that illuminate the day-to-day existence of the Franks’ lives in this hiding space—this living space—and their efforts to create something akin to the humdrum happiness of normalcy. Even for a cynic like me, the effect was deeply moving and chilling.

  I know that some people leave uplifted and inspired by Anne’s hopeful words, buoyed by their lyricism and introspection in the face of great evil. That’s not how I felt. I left disconcerted and upset by the ending of the story—no matter how positive Anne’s sentiments, and how admirable her ability to see the good in humanity, the fact is, she was a prisoner in her own home for years, and then she was captured and killed. This is a place that just should not exist, that should not have to exist, and whose very existence tugs at your soul and makes you despair in some elemental way. Life’s pretty fucked up: that’s my takeaway message.

  Near the end of the tour, I saw the British woman who had been in line in front of us, the stereotypical tourist with the flip-flops and tales of getting plastered. Now her sunglasses were off and her makeup was streaked.

  I followed her to the exit and we stepped out into the sunlight, young and free.

  We didn’t have much interest in bars after that. It would be overstating it to say that the Anne Frank House made us rethink our entire journey and question the wisdom and morality of trekking around Europe—in a quirky, frivolous way, no less—when we could be putting our time and energy and dollars to a more meaningful purpose. Not quite.

  It did, however, lead us to seek out some calm and contemplation, a respite from Frommering and tourist multitudes. We’d heard that if we rented bikes and followed the Amstel River out of town for just a mile or so, we’d find ourselves in a pastoral wonderland with cows and tulips and windmills and clog-wearing farmers inviting us into their ramshackle canalside cottages to sample their Gouda.

  We pedaled through the weekend crowds, parting them with cries of “fiets” (“bicycle!”) or incessant dings of our bells, the going slow but the experience liberating. The pedestrian masses eventually thinned, and then the streetscape followed suit, the narrow bike lanes giving way to a wide promenade along the river. We were flying, fleeing, loving the unfamiliar sight of trees and broad expanses of sky and enjoying the transgressive European thrill of biking without a helmet.

  This was the road less pedaled! Nary a souvenir shop or tourist-crammed landmark to be found.

  We were the only outsiders around, and we had front-row seats as we watched authentic locals doin
g their authentic local things. Yes! Sweet! Amazing! We were travelers, not tourists! And, hark, in the distance: a bustling restaurant like the one Frommer wrote about, where “the diners are served with amazing rapidity” and the patrons are all “good-natured”!

  If only…

  If only it hadn’t said “McDonald’s” on the sign out front. If only our surroundings hadn’t been suburban wasteland, denuded of a sense of place, vacant of tourists for a damn good reason. No tulips here, no windmills, and certainly no cows, at least not in forms larger than a quarter pound (with cheese).

  “Yeah, I don’t think this is quite what I had in mind,” Lee said.

  Here’s a little lesson for you: just because it’s off the beaten path doesn’t mean it’s charming. Everyday local reality is not necessarily alluring or traditional.

  We pedaled for nearly an hour and this is all we saw: broad highways and strip malls and industrial parks and vast swaths of land vacant but for a cover of weeds and a sign whose words I couldn’t read but whose sentiment was perfectly clear: “Coming Soon: New Development.” There were big-box stores and car dealerships and office parks that could have been in New Jersey or Omaha or anywhere back in the States. There was self-storage—self-storage! That quintessential icon of the too-much-stuff American lifestyle! The only canals were drainage ditches.

  We biked back into town as fast as we could.

  Brussels

  Baffling Capital of

  a Baffling Continent

  If you’re a medievalist at heart, or have a fairly

  substantial desire to study that age, then you’ll love

  Brussels. If not, stay far, far away, for this city is all

  history, and little else. It has neither the fleshpots of

  Paris, nor the grandeur of Rome, nor the

  boisterousness of Munich.

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  “Wow,” I said more baffled than impressed.

  “Wow,” Lee echoed. “So, um, that’s it?”

  It’s even smaller and stranger than you’d think. Not Brussels, I mean, but its most famous landmark, which we were now examining. In most countries, the national icon is a showcase of ingenuity and artistry and might: the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty. In Belgium, it is Manneken-Pis. A bronze statue of a toddler boy. Urinating. He’s a fountain, you see.

  Frommer calls him “the statue which all the ladies from Dubuque deplore,” and I suppose that even now, prudish types might find him objectionably vulgar. The prevailing sentiment, though, is surely not offense but disbelief. As in: “Really? That little guy is their iconic landmark? Man, what a weird place.”

  I snapped a photograph of the scene around the statue for a series I had begun titled “Not-So-Flattering Photos of Famous Places,” showing the broader setting outside the standard postcard view. If ever there were a tourist attraction where the surrounding spectacle held far more intrigue than the object itself, this is it. This particular photo includes one of the gift shops across the street (which sells ten varieties of chocolate in the shape of the young Monsieur Pis) and a handful of our fellow gawkers, of whom four have distinctly perplexed looks on their faces and just one is actually bothering to take a photo of the bronze boy.

  “Manneken-Pis doesn’t interest me,” I said. “What I do find fascinating is that so many other people find him so interesting.”

  Lee nodded. “He’s the original tabloid star, famous for being famous. He achieves notoriety through a scandalous act, and then everyone talks about him. Forever.”

  The weirdness of it all is, apparently, part of the attraction for the locals. At the City Museum of Brussels, there was a large exhibit about Manneken-Pis featuring a substantial selection of the seven-hundred-plus costumes in which he’s been adorned over the years and a video that explained his history and symbolism. I’m sure it was interesting. I wish I could repeat it. But all of this freshly acquired knowledge was instantly washed from my mind by the footage that followed, which featured a large crowd singing to and toasting the wee whizzer. They looked so proud of him. New-parent proud. College-graduation proud. Astronaut-just-back-from-space proud.

  “A small and absurd symbol of a small and absurd country,” said one locally produced brochure, with evident glee.

  Fair enough.

  If it’s absurdity and confusion you’re after, then this is the place for you. There’s the whole Dutch-French dueling-cultures thing, for starters. Belgium is divided into two main regions, for which the term “squabbling siblings” would be too generous, given its insinuation of underlying kinship and comity. In the north is Dutch-speaking Flanders; in the south, French-speaking Wallonia. But the French-speaking Brussels-Capital Region is, in fact, located in Flanders. The city is technically bilingual, so street signs are in both languages, as are advertisements—if you should happen to arrive at a train station early one morning, still a bit bleary-eyed, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that you’re seeing double when you spot two identical posters side by side; it’s only when you get close that you notice that the text is in different languages. And though Brussels itself is manifestly not unified, culturally, politically, or otherwise, it is the headquarters of one of the world’s most ambitious efforts in cultural and political unification, the European Union (EU).

  Also baffling is the city’s juxtaposition of the bleakly modern and the enchantingly historic. There are medieval Gothic edifices of such splendorous detail and imposing, towering mass that you half expect to see an actual, crown-wearing king gazing upon you from the tower, issuing orders. And then, a couple of blocks away, it’s a showcase of Regrettable Architecture of the Twentieth Century.

  “Brussels, above all, devours itself,” writes Geert Mak in his book In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century. “The city’s main artery, Boulevard Anspach, once Vienna and Paris rolled into one, is now a bare conduit, stripped of all monumentality. Brussels has always been adept at sophisticated self-mutilation.… No one loves this city, no one cares for her, no one takes her under his wing.”

  Yet Brussels may be, in fact, the very reason why the country has not split in two—neither Flanders nor Wallonia wants to relinquish it. Everyone we met seemed unreservedly proud of this city, in spite of its flaws, in spite of—or, more likely, because of—its weirdness. The complexity and absurdity make it feel more like a real city than many other European capitals. It is a place with no particular concern for what tourists think of it, where the split personality is on full display rather than hidden behind the bulwark of stereotypical Old World charm, where you might be bored after the first day of your visit, but where you could live quite happily.

  It was Tuesday and we were in Belgium. We had become a cliché. That is, unfortunately, not a joke but a statement of fact. Like the Grand Tour depicted in the stereotype-solidifying 1969 film If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, ours was a whirlwind journey, not stopping so much as pausing in each city just long enough to give it a superficial once-over—after less than seventy-two hours here, we would move on to Berlin.

  I was relieved, though (and slightly surprised), that Lee and I had ourselves broken from the Hollywood mold, with minimal melodrama or anything one might call bickering—we had few Odd Couple moments. There were two exceptions: First, when I dragged Lee into various bakeries in search of my chocolate croissant fix, as I was wont to do two or three times a day, and to which he would typically say, “Dude… again? You just ate!” and once added, “We need an intervention!” And, second, when we were lost. My plan of action when this happened was to keep walking, presuming that eventually we’d figure it out, or at least find another patisserie. Lee preferred the wholly unreasonable strategy of consulting a map—the current, up-to-date kind, the not-Frommer-approved kind. The desk clerk at our hostel had forced it on us, against my protestations, insisting—with a baffled, pitying look—that the hand-drawn map in my book wouldn’t do us much good. Not wanting to offend
our host, I took the map and shoved it in the bottom of my bag, out of sight, out of mind.

  Lee humored me, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before we both got desperate, meaning disoriented and hungry. In Amsterdam, we could typically rely on the concentric canals to give us a sense of where we were. Not so in Brussels. Without a logical street grid or bodies of water to orient us, our internal compasses spun aimlessly.

  Now, as we searched for a Frommer-recommended restaurant, we reached an intersection that looked vaguely familiar, but this only caused further confusion: Did we recognize it because it was near our hostel, meaning that if we kept walking, we’d figure out where we were? Or was it because we’d passed it five minutes ago from the opposite direction? We were trapped in an M. C. Escher drawing.

  I searched E5D for clues. Help me out here, Arthur, before Lee asks for—

  “All right,” he said. “Give me the map.”

  “The modern one?” I asked, stalling.

  “The useful one.”

  His frustration was palpable. I handed it over.

  “I’ll stand over here with my accurate information so that I don’t contaminate you,” Lee said.

  We were trying to find Restaurant Le Bigorneau, which Frommer recommended for a typical, authentic Belgian meal. Lee located the street on the map, then started laughing.

  “Check this out,” he said. I hesitated, so he thrust the map in my face.

  “A MILLION TOURISTS,” read the text. “The Beenhouwersstraat/Rue de Bouchers is a brightly lit area where only tourists come. Go there if you want to see how it works.”