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

by Douglas S. Mack

  We couldn’t find Restaurant Le Bigorneau, even with our modern map, but there were more than enough other cafés, all clones of each other, right down to the same Old World Amalgam decor: Provençal meets Tuscan meets Athenian meets 1950s Las Vegas cocktail lounge. In fact, I would have guessed that it was all the same enormous restaurant stretching for blocks if not for the different names on the neon signs above each awning and the competing hosts standing in the street, all North African men in their midthirties, who switched in an instant from glaring at each other to confronting passersby with a pitch that was more petulant than persuasive. It clearly was not an effective sales job: none of the restaurants had more than a handful of patrons. One host simply stood in the doorway, watching the scene, refreshingly indifferent to his potential customers. We rewarded his apathy. When he handed us our menus, we noted that even in the promotional photo on the cover, there were only eight patrons in this sprawling space.

  The menu was also the same as all the other restaurants’ and, like the decor, it covered the greatest hits of Europe: mussels, frites, pasta, pizza, some kind of chicken doused in some kind of sauce.

  It reminded me of the snack stands we’d seen throughout Amsterdam (including five in a single block), which all had the same display cases filled with a global tour of portable foods: hot dogs and waffles and doughnuts and croissants and pizza and kebabs—comforting munchies to satisfy stoned tourists from every culture.

  I’m tempted to call the menu offerings in Brussels a typically Belgian attempt to build a collective identity from disparate cultures, a part-laudable, part-laughable stab at creating a single European identity. That would be reading too much into it. This was not fusion; it was not high-minded; it was, like Amsterdam’s snack bars, lowest-common-denominator fare, following the money—if there were any to be had—rather than leading the way toward unity. It was the perfect encapsulation of the If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium experience: a baffling mash-up of cultures, satisfactory if not thrilling or engaging, offering a reassuringly perfunctory sense of having experienced the Continent.

  It didn’t help that everyone spoke English. Well, it did and it didn’t. It made for less confusion in the immediate experience, and I can’t really complain about that. But like the contents of the menu, the prevalence of my native tongue made me pause to recall what country I was in.

  The spread of English is the leading edge of culture leveling and, surely, a major cause of cultural confusion. If language is the key that unlocks culture, as the old truism has it, then this is a central question of modern tourism, perhaps the modern world in general: If we all speak the same language, at least rudimentarily, does that help or hurt our ability to understand each other on a deeper, societal level? Do we lose something by not having to struggle through in the language of our hosts, learning the nuance of the vocabulary and getting a sense of this linguistic infrastructure that defines everyday life? Or do we gain something by eliminating just enough of that struggle to communicate the essential details? (Allow me to give the obvious answer: yes to all. For an in-depth take on the matter, check out Robert McCrum’s book Globish.)

  It was something I’d been thinking about in every city since Florence, and this seems as good a place as any to offer a few notes on language:

  1. Frommer writes, “The most famous last words of the American tourist are: ‘They speak English everywhere.’ Well, they don’t. You can, with luck, be stranded in a European town among people who will simply shrug their shoulders to an English-uttered request.” This was a change from Temple Fielding’s approach: in decades of travel, he never learned another tongue, and the 1957 Fielding’s guide offers only a thirteen-line note on language, claiming that it “is no barrier” in modern Europe. Neither Fielding’s nor Fodor’s standard guidebooks of the era included phrasebook sections. Frommer, for his part, listed some thirty-one phrases in each of the major languages of the countries in his book, plus numbers and an array of food terms.

  2. However, Frommer tempers his caution about not relying on English with a promise that, actually, you don’t need to learn very much of a language to get by:

  In any language, a very small group of words and phrases can be shifted and rearranged to fulfill almost any need. If you can learn the foreign equivalents of such terms as “where is,” “do you have,” “how much is this”—then you can travel comfortably in Europe and make your wants known. Half an hour of study, packed in as your train or plane approaches a particular country, ought to do the job.

  3. In the spirit of Frommer’s reassurance and the fancy-free naïveté of the 1960s backpacker, I tried just this approach, reviewing Frommer’s phrases just before arriving in a new city, my reading becoming decidedly more harried and anxious as we pulled into the station and my where-am-I-what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here-this-is-crazy panic set in once more. I can report with authority that, uh, half an hour of study is not quite enough.

  4. Then again, even in situations when you don’t need an extensive vocabulary, preparation doesn’t help if you can’t remember what country you’re in or what language they speak. Caught up in the whirl of the Grand Tour, in one Brussels bakery, I asked for “deux croissant und ein jugo de naranja, please.”

  5. At the EU headquarters, where we were headed the next day, we would learn that there are twenty-three official EU languages (for twenty-seven countries); all documents and proceedings have to be translated into each. But they don’t always go straight from A to B—not a lot of people can speak both Greek and Finnish, or Latvian and Irish, for example. Instead, they have “relay languages,” meaning that a speech in Greek is translated into English, French, and Spanish, and then the Finnish translator takes it from there.

  6. According to the EU, 28 percent of Europeans know two other languages in addition to their mother tongue. As a second language, English is the most spoken, with 38 percent of non-British Europeans knowing enough to carry on a conversation.

  7. English is, therefore, Europe’s everyday relay language—especially on the tourist trail.

  8. Go into any restaurant, museum, or souvenir shop and it’s a good bet that all of the employees know enough English to communicate with you. If the employees are immigrants—and as noted earlier, many service industry workers are from other places—then they’re at least trilingual: native language, language of the country they’ve moved to, and English. (In Brussels, they’d do well to learn a bit of Dutch, too.) At one shop in Brussels, I asked in French for six postcards. The clerk counted them out in Italian and then told me the price in English.

  9. The same goes for street performers and panhandlers—anyone who has any expectation of contact with foreigners in tourist areas is likely to be at least passably bilingual.

  10. In other words, it’s fair to presume that nearly all tourist-area fast-food employees, and a large portion of the street performers and panhandlers, know a conversational level of more languages than do most college graduates in the United States.

  11. American pop culture is a big resource for English learners abroad. Shortly after Lee and I marveled at Manneken-Pis, we spotted a group of teenagers conversing in French and rapping in English to a Nas song. Earlier on the trip, I had watched some big, blond Vikingesque guys play basketball in a park. For the most part I had no idea what they were saying, but periodically there would be an outburst in English: “Shoooot!” “Three!” “Fuck!” “On fire!”

  12. It was jarring to hear those snatches of slang out of context, but equally jarring to have a conversation with someone who didn’t understand my own slang. Just about everyone you meet on the tourist trail speaks English, but perhaps not the version you’re used to. The words make sense, but the meaning takes some effort to parse because there are none of the subtle shortcuts that we take for granted in everyday communication, the slang and idioms and precise cadence and intonation that are as much a part of the language as the basic nouns and verbs and grammar rules. Talking one day to a Canad
ian expat who had lived in Europe for a few years, I let down my linguistic guard and made a sarcastic comment. He stared at me for a moment, confused and mildly offended, before bursting into a wide grin. “Oh! Sarcasm! Haven’t heard that in a while—sometimes I forget it exists. I really miss it.”

  Our hostel was just off the Grand Place, the central square that Arthur Frommer says is one of the most spectacular public spaces in Europe. That hasn’t changed: it’s certainly the most enthralling and majestic landmark in Brussels, with all due respect to Manneken-Pis.

  This was the first time so far that I had not stayed in a hotel recommended by Frommer, but, alas, all of those accommodations in Brussels were either closed or booked solid. That’s one problem with living in the Internet age, I suppose: more people make reservations in advance and conduct their due diligence with online research, leaving the procrastinators and technophobes among us with the dregs and the dungeons. Somehow, though, we lucked out and found a hostel that was dirt cheap, centrally located, and, as a bonus, decorated in a style that was part midcentury modern, part René Magritte—slick and surreal, in keeping with the baffling theme of the city.

  The lobby had free Wi-Fi, that essential amenity of modern accommodations. This was a huge relief—finally, I could update my blog.

  I appreciate the irony, believe me. Here I was, proud of my willful ignorance but agonizing over my inability to share it with the world. Shunning up-to-date guidebooks, doing things the old-fashioned way in an effort to prove that it was better, but carrying a laptop and documenting my experiment via the technological trend of the moment. I had started the blog only a few weeks earlier, intending merely to keep in touch with a handful of friends and family back home. But while old habits die hard, new habits are more insidious, their illicit thrills all delight and no guilt, and soon the mere thought of going without Internet access for forty-eight hours was enough to give me the shakes.

  So, Tuesday evening, I sat in the lobby, updating the blog, while Lee, king of the nightlife, turned in for an early bedtime. I was halfway through my post when I heard an earth-shattering blast of opera, Wagner or something—the sort of ominous and over-the-top music played during the opening frames of a Hollywood battle scene as the army of bad guys appears on the horizon. Somewhere outside, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were coming, or perhaps it was Arthur Frommer, parachuting from the clouds in his Korean War army uniform, hunting me down for having cheated on him by staying here. The music seemed to be on an endless crescendo, the intensity and volume rising with each measure. It was genuinely terrifying.

  I heard someone stumbling down the stairs, and soon Lee appeared, fully dressed, groggy, and seething. “If they’re not going to let me sleep,” he said, “I’m going to crash their party.”

  “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything out the window.”

  “You might not want to go out there unarmed.”

  Lee pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket. The side of it read “Bad Boy Bail Bonds, Baltimore.”

  “I’m good,” he said and disappeared into the night.

  I quickly finished my blog post and dashed out to investigate for myself.

  Town Hall, the most magnificent and imposing building in a magnificent and imposing and classically Old World square, was on fire. Okay, no, not really. Symbolically. The entire facade facing the Grand Place was covered in an ever-changing light show projected from the City Museum of Brussels, with that apocalyptic music as the soundtrack. If you’ve ever been to a drive-in movie, imagine that but with a screen that is, I don’t know, five or six times larger and just so happens to be a fifteenth-century Gothic structure, all pointed arches and narrow windows and more statues in more places than you would have guessed was possible, an army’s worth of saints and nobles. The light show spanned the width of the building and all the way to the top of the central tower, more than three hundred feet up, where yet another statue surveyed the scene below.

  (We later learned that this was Saint Michael, patron saint of Brussels. “He’s God’s bouncer, and he uses a flaming sword to do it,” Lee explained. “He’s fighting Lucifer.” When I asked how he knew this, he said that he was raised Catholic, then reached under his shirt and pulled out the silver chain hanging around his neck. “I used to have a Saint Michael medal on here”—he grinned—“but I lost it while hooking up with a girl.”)

  I cannot verify this, obviously, but I’d guess that if I had looked up at Saint Michael through a pair a binoculars, I’d have found his gilt brow furrowed and his lips frozen in a puzzled frown as he watched a light show worthy of the world’s biggest rave flash below. The building and the square beneath him required no added spectacle to be spectacular. The Grand Place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightfully so—even without knowing about the history (French bombardment, 1695—look it up), you know, instantly, that epic things have happened here, that this is history.

  The light show was entertaining, to be sure, but made me a bit melancholy for that very reason—it was incongruously razzle-dazzle, like jazz hands during a waltz. In all other respects, Brussels is like the restaurant host who won us over—charming in its lack of pretense or concern for keeping tourists delighted and amused. It’s not self-confident, but it seems to be at ease with its internal confusion and dissonance, a bit neurotic but okay with that. I appreciated that. I like boring cities. I’m from Minneapolis. I like having to make some effort to find the intrigue and the spectacle and to learn for myself that a particular place isn’t so boring after all.

  After a restless night—there turned out to be a second light show, after which a band somewhere down the block blared “Girl from Impanema” in an unbroken loop for several hours—Lee and I woke up late but determined. We had a field trip planned.

  We were headed to the European Union headquarters, most of which dates to the early 1990s or later—this is, emphatically, not the Old World part of Brussels. To walk there from the Grand Place is to see, stride by stride, the evolution of a continent.

  You start with grandeur and opulence and war—the building blocks of European culture as it exists in the tourist mind. As you leave the Grand Place, the buildings are less majestic but still historic, Gothic architecture giving way to Art Nouveau, the charms more discreet and intimate but still unquestionably Continental. Here and there, a few flashes of modernity: a chic bistro in a historic building, an all-glass facade nestled between two others of worn stone topped with weary gargoyles. Old and charming gives way to old and grim gives way to modern and grim. The litter changes, too, from paper bags from the Tintin shop and Godiva store to bottles, some of them broken, and tattered plastic bags. A construction crane hovers above. The buildings are narrow postwar structures, dilapidated and dreary, some with broken windows, some with posters covering the entire first floor, some with Dumpsters out front and more cranes above. Are they destroying or renewing or… what? There’s a Thai restaurant in the middle of the block; a woman in a hijab walks by you, chatting on a cell phone. A gust of wind drops a crumpled copy of the Financial Times at your feet. The buildings are nearly all glass now, with only a few remnants of the past, incongruous beauty marks of history. “TO LET/ Prestigeous [sic] Offices/ Have a look inside,” says a sign on one of the glass structures. The people around you are dressed formally, corporately. Still more cranes, plus scaffolding everywhere. Then, weirdly, the landscape shifts again, as if there’s a demarcation between two worlds. On this side of the street is a sports bar called Fat Boy’s and a one-hour photo store (those places still exist?), both housed in what appear to be nineteenth-century buildings. And across the road is a sleek corporate campus, its design clever but placeless, a product of a time when cultures are at peace yet, you can’t help but think, perhaps bereft of vigor and imagination. Because the sense that you get when viewing this campus is not “halls of power” but “big sale at the Foot Locker on the third floor next to the food court!” This
is the EU.

  The EU visitors’ center has all manner of brochures and pamphlets for the taking, from kids’ books with whimsical drawings to dense, policy-heavy publications. Most, though, are attractively designed explanations of the myriad ways that the EU helps everyone and everything: “Better off in Europe: How the EU’s single market benefits you”; “From farm to fork: Safe food for Europe’s consumers”; “Europe for women.” Lee rolled his eyes as I helped myself, filling up my bag.

  A common theme across all the booklets was the importance of being “united in diversity” while building a tangible, collective sense of identity. “The process of European integration has not smothered different ways of life, traditions and cultures of its peoples,” read lesson one of a booklet titled “Europe in twelve lessons.” Like the melting pot that the United States aspires to be, a united Europe, the EU says, can create a greater whole from the sum of its parts.

  Sounds good, but as Lee put it, the history of Europe is the history of people being horrible to each other—and while they don’t often fight literal battles anymore, true unity is elusive. As the euro struggled and the world economy tanked in 2010, the Economist commented on the tenuous relationship between France and Germany, two Continental powers trying to steady the EU in a storm of political turmoil. The observations were a worthy stand-in for discussions of the entire region: “Despite finding each other ‘mutually unbearable,’ as one European ex–foreign minister puts it, the two have found a way to get along.… A rival perception, however, suggests that they are more like a rival couple on the verge of divorce: they agree on little, and trust each other even less.”

  Since its beginnings with the Common Market in 1957 (there’s that pivotal year again), the EU has ushered in a host of changes that have made travel tremendously easier: open borders, a common currency (well, for seventeen of its member states)—and with this freer flow of goods and people comes a freer flow of culture.