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

by Douglas S. Mack

  “What we should do,” Lee said, “is see what kind of nightlife they do have today. You know, for research.”

  I stared him down. He was serious—and my pained expression seemed only to be fueling his enthusiasm.

  “Adventure,” he said, an impish grin spreading across his face, that devil-may-care glimmer lighting up his eyes once more.

  My anticlubbing instinct kicked in. (Some might call it misanthropy or social anxiety. I call it reason.) A new death-in-Europe scenario flitted through my mind, this one involving a ’roided-up former East German bodybuilder, possibly known by the moniker Helmut der Hulk, with greenish skin and reddish eyes and a hobby of literally snapping scrawny tourists in two. Or, best-case scenario, it would be epically awkward, even by my standards, with Lee dancing with a gaggle of supermodels as I nursed a Sprite at a table in the back or retreated to the bathroom to check my hair and mope.

  After a few moments, though, this subsided. In a weird way, I kind of, sort of wanted to check it out for myself. Frommer, I reasoned, would have demanded it.

  “Spirit of adventure,” Lee said.

  “Spirit of adventure.” I nodded, feeling my own eyes gleam.

  The fatalistic energy that Frommer found so enthralling clearly had not subsided. If anything, it seemed to have new life in the unified city. Berlin the awkward teenager was also Berlin the partying teenager. The bar and club district of the former East Berlin was crowded with revelers when we arrived.

  Thirty seconds after we sat down in the first bar, Vanilla Ice’s nerdy Teutonic cousin sidled up. His blond hair was plowed into pseudocornrows that peeked out from beneath a baseball cap tilted at an impossible angle. He was a parody of a wannabe gangster.

  “Whaddup, Americans!” he said, his voice jaunty but sinister. “What you want, homeboys? Weed? Coke? Refurbished East German military weapons?”

  I’m not sure if that’s actually what he said. We surmised. It was implied in his tone and his furtive head swivels. This was one time when we were happy to have a language barrier.

  It was that kind of bar. Everything I’d feared. Between the clientele and the bizarre decor—hobbit hole meets steampunk meets landfill—it was seediness as accidental performance art. Even the intrepid Lee found it unsettling.

  We moved on, dodging the masses thronging the sidewalks. One group of men wore matching black shirts reading “OLLIE’S STAG—BERLIN 2009,” the screen-printed slogan giving their revelry a melancholy, conventioneer air.

  “That’s better, right?” Lee asked, pointing to another bar. It was sleek, sophisticated, calm.

  “Yes,” I said. “Much better.”

  We settled onto a pair of stools at the U-shaped bar that dominated the middle of the space. Lanternlike pendants traced the curve of the bar and cast an amber glow on the room. It felt like that rare place that tries to contrive hipness and actually succeeds.

  “Have you ever had an Old Fashioned?” Lee asked as we looked over the lengthy drink menu.

  I had not.

  “I think you’d like it. And we definitely need to get you a cocktail—they clearly know what they’re doing.” He gestured to the bartenders’ setup, pointing out the fresh fruit, the obscure bitters, the mad-scientist contraptions.

  “Do you get mostly tourists or locals here?” Lee asked the bartender as we sipped our drinks—Old Fashioned for me, gin and tonic for him.

  “Tourists. But it’s cool,” the bartender replied. His name was Tomas. He had an easygoing urbanity, with tousled hair and a tailored black shirt with rolled-up sleeves, which he absentmindedly adjusted every few minutes. He stepped over to the two women seated beside us, and we could hear them order in English.

  “Americans?” Lee asked the women as Tomas made their drinks, each action meticulous but executed with a subtle flair.

  “Yeah! You, too?” said the one seated next to Lee.

  I noted with amusement that the farther we get from home, the broader the range of common ground we use to connect with strangers. In Minneapolis, seeing someone wearing a T-shirt of my high school might make me strike up conversation. If I go to New York, anyone wearing a Minnesota Twins hat is suddenly my friend. Abroad: We’re from the same huge country! What an amazing coincidence! Let’s hang out together! In the midst of unfamiliar surroundings, we instinctively, subconsciously seek out whatever reminders of home we can find.

  Tara was in town for a work-related conference; her sister, Amy, was a graduate student savoring her last days of vacation before school started up again. As usual, we found it surprisingly easy to slip into banter about the city around us, the reasons that brought us here, and where we had come from. Our tourist status gave us common ground, and conversation, which had never come easily for me at home, suddenly felt like second nature. Tomas dropped in and out of the conversation as he worked, trading cocktail knowledge with Lee and slipping us all samples of concoctions he was making.

  “What do you suggest next?” I asked him when I was done with my Old Fashioned. I had been sipping it, savoring it, for the better part of an hour. Lee, too, was still on his first drink.

  “You liked it?” Tomas asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

  Tomas thought for a moment. “Have you had a Sazerac?”

  “A classic cocktail—from New Orleans,” Lee said approvingly.

  “Never heard of it,” I said. “Love to try it. I trust your judgment.”

  All of my anxieties had melted away without me even noticing.

  We sat for another hour—maybe two, maybe three; I lost track of time—nursing our drinks, enjoying the conversation and the show, soaking up the scene.

  I kept waiting for Lee to make his move, to start flirting with Tara or Amy or to seek out one of the many well-dressed—and English-speaking—women around us. He never did.

  I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out, but the Lee of the page was not the Lee of real life. The one I was getting to know was a lot less of a roguish lothario than I’d expected.

  Sure, Lee was still far more dashing and confident than I was. He was more than willing to push me out of my comfort zone—and thank goodness for that. But he had no more interest in the esoteric nightlife of Berlin than I did; his spirit of adventure was not all that adventurous. We weren’t going to wind up in jail or facedown in the river. The reasons he liked to go barhopping, I finally understood, had nothing to do with excess or debauchery, nothing to do with getting smashed or scoring a hostel hookup. It was simply about hanging out with friends and maybe, if it happened, making some new friends. That was why he always wanted to sit at the bar, the social center, where he could chat with the bartender, get some local knowledge, and, in the true manner of a writer, just sit back and watch the minor dramas unfolding around him.

  There’s something that social theorists call a “third place,” a place in life other than home or work, a space used purely for socialization, without the obligations and burdens of the first two places. Diners and coffee shops are prime examples, and so are bars. That was the appeal of nightlife to Lee: just hanging out, savoring the moments and the company like a finely crafted cocktail.

  Of course, that’s also a big reason why we tourists travel, even on the beaten path, even if we only have a few days, like Amy and Tara—to escape the burdens of the familiar, to enjoy the new, to savor the world. Lee’s attitude toward bars was similar to mine about the tourist trail: if you approach it with the right mindset and eyes wide open, intent on soaking up the atmosphere and making those connections rather than simply doing the cliché, shallow things in the cliché, shallow way, you really can discover new places, meet interesting people, and feel a sense of wonder and delight.

  I surveyed the scene, telling myself to remember this more than I remembered the wall coming down. It was what I’d come to think of as a Montmartre Moment, an unexpected but wonderous encounter, when my anxieties evaporated and all felt right with the world. The Goddess Serendip
ity had done it again.

  “Two oh six a.m.,” Lee said as we arrived back at the hostel. “By Berlin standards, we are pathetic.”

  There was no frustration in his voice, though. It was an observation, not a complaint.

  Munich

  If You Brew It, They Will Come

  A light-hearted, fun-loving city whose residents look

  upon the pursuit of pleasure as a full-time occupation.

  If you want to imbibe something of the atmosphere of

  nineteenth-century Europe—go to Munich.

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  “Cheers,” I said to Lee, raising my mug, a veritable Big Gulp of beer.

  “Cheers,” Lee replied, clinking his glass to mine.

  On the table in front of us were trays piled with food, including pretzels big enough to wear as necklaces. Moderation and Munich, as we would soon discover, are contradictory terms.

  We had arrived in Munich just a few hours earlier, but we had already found our way to one of the city’s oldest beer gardens, Augustiner Keller, which dates to 1812. Frommer doesn’t mention it, but I hope he came here anyway, because it seems like his kind of place: plenty of people, barrels of beer. The sprawling grounds can seat five thousand patrons, and even with a paltry couple thousand here tonight, it had an electric, heady atmosphere. Of course, the liter-sized mugs of beer helped with that. But even before we started drinking, the place had the feel of an enchanted forest, with scores of towering chestnut trees forming an almost unbroken canopy soaring above a white-gravel carpeting. (We later learned that chestnut trees were chosen specifically because they don’t have deep roots, thereby enabling a larger beer cellar. Score another point for German engineering.)

  “The most brilliant part of this place is right behind you,” Lee said, pointing with his fork.

  I turned to see, in the middle of the sea of tables and committed drinkers, a little playground, with Teutonic tykes climbing on a jungle gym. Bacchanalia for the whole brood.

  The garden was populated with an impressive cross section of humanity: tourists of all ages and nationalities, families having picnics with food they’d clearly brought in themselves, lederhosen-clad German men with ruddy cheeks bisected by sculptural mustaches. Servers delivered beer steins eight or ten at a time, grasping them in double handfuls.

  “Maybe you should bring the Contessa here on a date,” I suggested to Lee.

  The Contessa was the woman working at the front desk when we checked into our hostel. She was beautiful, with an enchanting, oft-flashed smile bracketed by deep dimples. Lee was convinced that she was Italian, most likely a countess. Some obscure provision in her grandfather’s will mandated that she come here to find a mate. A backpacker. An American. At least, that was the theory, and I was too amused to dispute it.

  “Nah, she’s probably already been here too many times,” Lee said. “She probably owns the place, actually.”

  “It’s hard to impress someone like that,” I agreed.

  I proposed another toast: “To the Contessa and your prospects for wooing her. Cheers.” We clinked glasses again and settled back to enjoy this party in a forest.

  On every tourist thoroughfare in Europe, you will find the following:

  A dreadlocked backpacker moaning into a didgeridoo, with a Buddhist prayer bowl serving as a change bucket.

  A classical string trio, hip in black shirts and dark jeans, playing Pachelbel’s Canon.

  An opera singer belting out “Nessun dorma” or “O sole mio.” Slightly frayed, rumpled formal attire.

  An aggressively bohemian (and possibly fedora-wearing) guitarist singing either “Mad World” or a Bob Marley mix that is not so much medley as stoned confusion about which song is which.

  A ponytailed guy of unknown South American extraction playing Simon and Garfunkel songs on the Peruvian pan flute.

  One person playing the local traditional music. This musician will have the smallest audience: zero.

  By now, Lee and I were playing street musician bingo every time we were in a tourist area (that is to say, every day). And tonight, man, we were hitting the jackpot as we meandered down Neuhauserstrasse and then Kaufingerstrasse, the pedestrian malls that serve, collectively, as the main tourist drag in Munich.

  For good measure here, there was also a group singing glee-club versions of Amy Winehouse songs (you have not lived until you’ve heard “Rehab” in chipper four-part harmony) and a couple of extra classical groups, including one that had hauled out an upright piano. The rest of the scene, too, was ideally clichéd: Gothic architecture; seemingly few locals aside from teenagers (although the spot-the-American game was difficult here, too); a living statue, this one dressed as the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz; and assorted chain stores (after we’d walked a ways, I exclaimed, “I can’t believe we haven’t seen an H&M. Where is it?” No more than ten seconds later, Lee pointed: “There it is.”). Most impressive, I thought, was that nearly every window display, even the chain stores’, had an at least quasi-Bavarian theme. C&A, a hip clothing store, was selling designer lederhosen for ninety-nine euros; more upscale boutiques displayed lederhosen and dirndls for several times more.

  There was a quiet energy pulsing through the streets, much as there had been at the beer garden. An anticipatory buzz. Oktoberfest, that famous carnival of carousing, was to begin in just over a week, and the preparations for the tourist onslaught were well under way, the hatches being battened down, the commemorative beer steins being placed in every shop window, the clichés being dusted off and polished up.

  We started the next morning with a visit to an attraction that gave Manneken-Pis, the ribald little mascot of Brussels, a run for his money in the Silliness Sweepstakes. Let’s check in with the Frommer guide—or rather, a correspondent quoted in the Readers’ Suggestions section at the end of the chapter:

  One of the best free sights in Europe is the Glockenspiel, the animated clock tower of the city Rathaus, which “performs” at 11 a.m. each day, when its colorful figures dance the ancient steps of the Beer Barrel Makers.

  I’d like to think that this comment is a sign of a more innocent time, that it conclusively demonstrates that not so long ago, life was more full of wonder, and tourists were more easily amused and less jaded. Because my reaction to it—indeed, the only possible reaction for the twenty-first-century viewer—is: Seriously? Thousands of people watch this every day?

  On the tourist trail, the difference between the tourist traps that are actually kind of interesting and those that are fairly awful—by which I mean awful-awful, not amusingly awful—is paper-thin. When it comes to tacky tourism, you just know it when you see it, as the saying goes about a certain other, more lurid form of spectacle and exploitation. The Eiffel Tower is unequivocally cool—that I say without hesitation. Manneken-Pis is absurd, clearly, although intriguing in its irreverence and broader symbolism. The Glockenspiel, though, is the beaten path at its most stereotypically crowded and inane. This is one cliché I could never embrace.

  The whole show—think glorified windup toy and you pretty much have it—lasts some twelve to fifteen minutes, during which even the most committed Luddite will inevitably give thanks for living in an age of video games and other amusements a bit more whiz-bang than this. Even our tour guide openly mocked the Glockenspiel (“Here come the mechanical hip thrusts—he’s a cheeky fellow, that one!”) and gently chastised those who were taking photos: “Don’t bother. Your arm will get sore now and your friends will be unimpressed later.”

  I took a Not-So-Flattering Photo of the scene, skipping the landmark entirely and focusing instead on all the people filming the spectacle. Several others also turned their viewfinders on the crowd. A few took photos of me taking photos of them: the tourist as attraction, the funhouse mirror of the beaten path. It was not the first time I’d seen this, nor would it be the last.

  It made me wish, for a moment, that I had ditched Frommer and gone to a charming Mediterranean vil
lage—filled with eccentric, authentic locals—after all. But then I reminded myself to be happy, to embrace the cliché. I was in Munich. Life was good.

  Even our tour guide couldn’t kill my blissful buzz, though I have no doubt he accomplished the feat for others in our group. He was the opposite of Ines XVI. I won’t use his real name; let’s just call him Nigel. Here and there, he had some fleeting moments of seriousness and stone-faced recollections of Nazi-era events and other painful chapters in the city’s history—Kristallnacht, the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Olympics—but he recounted these in a hurry, eager to change the subject; his stories tended to take a ribald turn. And in Munich’s culture and history, he had a bawdy enabler.

  He told us about the “beer wenches” at the Hofbräuhaus (the city’s most famous beer hall), a chuckle of dirty-old-man delight in his tone as he spoke of the women who historically served drinks in their “tight dirndls.” As we passed a statue of Puck, he grabbed the hand of one of the women in our group—who had already rebuffed his advances—and cupped it over the figure’s crotch. “Ooh! Eew!” Nigel crowed. “You touched his willy!” He snickered loudly. She shook her head and cast him a contemptuous smirk, not offended so much as sorry for him. A few moments later, he pointed out a gutter that was once an open sewer, then shoulder-checked another woman into it, laughing, “Eew! You just stepped in piss!” Whenever someone kindly observed that he should, you know, cut that out, he just shrugged it off.

  I couldn’t help seeing this offensive behavior as a reminder of how far we’ve come. Comments that were commonplace or seemingly innocuous in the era of Europe on Five Dollars a Day would play quite differently now, give or take a Nigel or two.

  Take the examples of certain guidebook writers. Neither Fielding, Fodor, nor Frommer was always what we might today call politically correct. Fielding’s nightlife sections are often filled with borderline salacious commentary, as in his recommendation of a Paris club that is “one of the top bets for aficionados of the female torso.” Arthur Frommer, for his part, suggests a visit to a swimming hole for “a view of Paris babes with a little less on” and a café notable for its “buxom waitress.” (The café is still open. My waiter was a middle-aged guy who looked like Rodney Dangerfield.) His Stockholm chapter includes nearly two pages on “girl-watching,” beginning with this: “In the area around Skansen, you’ll soon discover why the girls of Sweden are that nation’s chief export, best tourist attraction and most highly developed achievement.” Here in Munich, he says, you can’t miss the Hofbräuhaus, not only because of the beer but because “this is your choice for a terribly inexpensive evening, full of Teutonic hanky-panky.” Each chapter has lines like that. It’s not just the prices of the book that are anachronistic.