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

by Douglas S. Mack

  In a sense, the joy of tourism is the return to youth and innocence. It’s finding wonder in the unfamiliar, of not being afraid to say, “Wow, that’s so freaking cool!” It’s arriving in a place with the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning. Meanwhile, the Ryan Binghams and the Random Backpacker #22s are the adults, world-weary and wise, but missing out on the fun and the sense of discovery and delight.

  Somewhere, Arthur Frommer was shaking his head. In the depths of my inner ear, I heard his voice: “Spending more does not mean enjoying more. Go back to the hostels.”

  “How strange,” Frommer says in E5D, “to be in a country where (a) everything works, (b) everyone seems well-off, (c) all appliances, machinery, telephones and gadgets are more modern than ours.”

  Zurich is a Ryan Bingham city: successful, savvy, bustling, bland. So goes the stereotype, one that a stay in a business hotel out by the convention center does nothing to dispel. (Admittedly, this sort of place should not be anyone’s first impression of anywhere.)

  The view from here is this: Zurich is the better-off cousin of Brussels, a blur of cultures and official languages, a crossroads of businesspeople and bureaucrats. As in Brussels, much of its appeal is its very banality—it may not have much to attract tourists, but because it is such an international crossroads, the whole place feels agreeably neither here nor there. It was odd, after being surrounded in Germany by the monuments and still-fresh memories of war, to arrive in a famously neutral country, a place that by staying out of conflicts has also missed out on the historic sites they leave behind. It’s crass to say it, but here’s the truth: happiness and pragmatism can be pretty dull. In a blandness-defending essay titled “The Discreet Charm of the Zurich Bourgeoisie,” native son Alain de Botton adds, “Zurich’s distinctive lesson to the world lies in its ability to remind us how truly imaginative and humane it can be to ask of a city that it be nothing other than bourgeois.”

  There’s a catch to the banal bourgeois bliss, though: it’s really freaking expensive, apparently set up for those with expense accounts worthy of Ryan Bingham.

  Lee and I had thought that our fondue meal, our big-time splurge, was high livin’ at about sixty dollars total, including drinks. The next day, as we searched for some lunch, we discovered this had been a bargain. A Big Mac Value Meal (not that we had one) cost eleven francs, with the Swiss franc essentially even with the American dollar. At a café by the river, not a fancy place by any means, a chalkboard advertised the day’s lunch specials: a hamburger for twenty-two francs and a club sandwich twenty-three. Even a Snickers bar from a vending machine would have set me back over two francs. Strolling through the commercial heart of town, we ogled all the tourists—speaking English, German, Russian, and languages we didn’t recognize—who had apparently come here to shop in stores where the windows displayed four-thousand-dollar cuff links and twenty-three-thousand-dollar watches. It was difficult to fathom.

  Frommer promised a city with “costs low enough to remove the fear of expense from your vacation thoughts,” but this turns out, today, to feel like a cruel joke. A 2010 study by the financial services company UBS found that Zurich is the second most expensive city in the world (of seventy-three cities studied), after Oslo.

  “The question is, how long will a family with an average income be able to afford a trip to Switzerland?” a Zurich hotelier asked BusinessWeek in 2010. The Swiss franc was gaining strength, but to the hospitality industry, it was cause for panic rather than celebration.

  It’s impossible not to think about cost when planning a trip. Travel has certainly come a long way since the days when my father’s parents assumed that my mother was independently wealthy because she was traveling to Europe. Not really—she was just incredibly diligent about following Frommer’s advice. The truth is, though, that the Frommerian ideal of travel as accessible to everyone is still nowhere near reality.

  Take a look at the evolution of the titles of Frommer’s signature guidebook series. The budgets started at $5 a day, then rose to $10 in 1972, $15 in 1979, and so on, but they rose faster than the overall cost of living—travel inflation outpaced everyday inflation. (Although, as noted earlier, airfares today are substantially cheaper than they were in the 1960s.) For example, according to the U.S. government’s inflation estimates, $5 in 1957 had the same buying power as $36.89 in 2007. The guidebook title that year, though, was Europe from $95 a Day. It was the last of the Frommer’s “dollar a day” books; the series was retired before it could cross the $100 threshold.

  Being in Zurich, where I felt broke, was a reminder that leisure travel is still not truly accessible to all—not to most of the world, not even to many people in my own prosperous homeland, where the poverty rate was basically the same as it had been during my mother’s trip (14.5 percent in 2010 versus 14.2 percent in 1967).

  The common wisdom among many travel bloggers and self-appointed travel experts today is that going abroad is less expensive than you think; you just have to know what you’re doing. It’s a talking point that Frommer helped create, and there’s no denying that it’s still valid: you can go farther than you’d think on a limited budget, especially in these DIY days of Internet research, Internet cost-comparisons, Internet booking. The point sometimes spins out of control, though, myopically dismissing the reality that international travel, however cheap, remains an inaccessible luxury for much of the world. When you get right down to it, no, the open road still really isn’t all that open.

  After much searching, we found an affordable lunch option the next day. A long line snaked from a shack of a restaurant out onto Limmatquai, a street along the river. The patrons seemed to come from all walks of life, at least by Zurich standards, meaning one or two wore jeans with the slightest of fraying around the cuffs. Lee and I exchanged looks and joined the queue, trusting in the frugal instincts of the masses and the Goddess Serendipity. When we got to the counter, we ordered what everyone else was having: half a rotisserie chicken, with a huge rustic roll on the side. Cost: 9.50 francs. That sounded about right, maybe even a bit cheap, given the quantity and quality—the chicken was succulent and delicious, street food at its best.

  Afterward, we sat by the lake. The meal had boosted our moods and choice of adjectives, replacing “boring” with “placid.” Boats and swans carved figures in the water, their listless gliding an odd counterpoint to the bustle of the people on the shore. Our gaze kept drifting to the mountain ranges in the distance, the mists somehow giving each peak its own hue, hazily delineating the forms and distances, sharpening rather than flattening the scene.

  “It looks like they’ve got the fog machines fired up,” I said.

  “And carefully placed,” Lee added. “It’s pretty impressive.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s why everything here costs so much. Their fog machine budget must be huge.”

  “Not worth it,” I grumbled. “Not enough to make me want to linger here—I’m gonna go broke in the next twenty-four hours. And I’m only about halfway done with this trip.” I paused, letting that thought linger in my brain. Wait: did I want to go home, impending brokeness aside?

  I cleared my throat. “Uh. I mean… Not that I’m complaining about the fact that I’m staying here and you have to go home.”

  Lee chuckled. “Ah, no. You’d better not complain about that.”

  The fog machines reminded me of my favorite of my mother’s postcards. It’s from Switzerland. There’s a picture of a bull on the front, all jowls and horns, with an enormous bell dangling from a leather collar around its neck. The photo is cropped to a heart-shaped frame; the rest of the front is bright red, lipstick red, with text printed in a jaunty handwriting script: “A toi mon coeur!!!” My heart belongs to you. Mom has crossed out toi, though, and scratched in the word vous. My heart belongs to you all. The postcard is addressed to my father and his housemates, “The Men of 1003 8th St. SE.”

  Dear guys—

  Ann and I saw this postcard today in Geneva, befo
re we climbed all over the castle at Chillon (of Lord Byron fame)—and decided that someone ought to buy it and send it to a deserving soul far away so that it could be appreciated in more than one part of the world. In other words, I can’t believe anyone would make anything like this, let alone buy it! The castle is fantastic. I took at least 10 photos, slides, and bought multi postcards which you shall see. To Florence tonight by train—hate to leave Switzerland.

  Love (esp to Bob),

  Pat

  I love it because it’s so silly: the cow, the bell, the heart, the Valentine declaration. I love it because it’s such a classically tacky postcard, and because this is the precise reason Mom bought it—it’s a nice reminder that self-awareness and irony are timeless, not a modern invention, and that Mom, too, delighted in embracing clichés and finding a certain joie de vivre in the absurdity of it all. I love it, too, because of that penultimate line: she took, gosh, at least ten photos.

  Here in Zurich, I found that I was taking fewer pictures than usual—that is to say, in the low dozens rather than the low hundreds. Part of it was that aesthetic irony was in surprisingly short supply in this boring bourgeois city—I had few opportunities for my Not-So-Flattering Photos of Famous Places. There are only so many times you can take a picture of a historic clock tower, a cobblestoned street winding down a hill lined with ski lodges on steroids, and mountains cloaked in machine-made fog. Lee had been rolling his eyes throughout the trip as I took my photos, and now, as our journey together came to an end, I realized it was time to put the camera away and enjoy the moment.

  It’s a problem that my mom didn’t have to worry about: addiction to overdocumentation. She had to put effort and forethought into her photos. Film was expensive. Processing was a chore. Today, thanks to the instant gratification of digital cameras, we can spend all day seeing the world only through the comforting, limiting shield of the lens. Too often, I felt like I’d forgotten about the big picture, quite literally—I was missing out on the scene outside the frame, the sounds, the smells, the particular sense of place, the full narrative. I noticed, to my chagrin, that my first instinct upon seeing something interesting or beautiful was often not to take it all in but to think, “Can’t wait to post this on Facebook!” Then, when it wasn’t perfect—and it never was—I’d scowl at the tiny screen and try again, a dozen times.

  This is a big reason I’d started taking those Not-So-Flattering Photos: because I wanted to document the landmarks, but I didn’t want to spend hours trying to get just the right angle, just the right light, just the right photogenic passersby in the frame. It hadn’t taken long—about ten seconds into my gawking at the Duomo in Florence, an immense cathedral surrounded by a piazza filled with crowds and souvenir kiosks—to realize that those vendors I was trying to keep out of my frame would sell me a much better photograph, on a postcard, for just a few (euro) cents. Or I could find them on Flickr for free. Why bother to replicate the views? More to the point, it was typically the story outside of the usual frame that was most interesting: the traffic at the Champs-Élysées, the gift shops near Manneken-Pis, Snackpoint Charlie, the swans pecking at our feet as we sat by Zürichsee (Lake Zurich) right now. (As it turns out, there’s now software you can buy called the Tourist Remover app—it clears out the imperfections, such as, oh, other tourists.)

  Well, enough of that, I told myself. Frommer, I suspected, would have agreed: to spend less time obsessing about impressing others later… is to enjoy more.

  I refused to put the camera away entirely, mind you. I still appreciated its ability—its occasional ability, which I naively hoped for every time—to tell more than words ever could. Because, man, sometimes the world is too weird not to document it.

  Case in point: the woman in the flowerpot hat.

  “That’s quite an outfit she has on,” Lee said. “She seems a bit… eccentric.”

  “There’s no way she’s not a crazy cat lady,” I said as I pulled out my camera. “I bet she has, like, twenty cats. At least.”

  Lee and I had trekked up Lindenhof Hill, in the center of town, where a Roman citadel once stood. The fort was razed in the Middle Ages and is now a public square (How Swiss, I thought when I heard that—down with the military, up with quality of life), though the historic houses that surround three sides have a buttressing effect, making the grounds feel like the courtyard of a castle. We sat on a wall overlooking the northern part of the city, watching kids chase leaves in the occasional gusts and a wizened old man in a newsboy cap take on a young hoodlum-looking guy—amusingly, also wearing a newsboy cap—in a game of chess on one of those oversized boards that is apparently obligatory in urban European parks.

  Crazy Cat Lady appeared to be leading a tour or, more likely, was out on a day pass from the asylum, with an assortment of orderlies trailing behind her. She wore a fluffy pink bathrobe and that hat, a plush flowerpot with felt flowers drooping over its sides; she was Martha Stewart meets Medusa meets Ophelia.

  And then, dear God, she looked right at us and started walking in our direction.

  I glanced at the drop on the other side of the wall. It was about twenty feet. There were bushes at the bottom. We could probably make it with minimal harm, I thought. The Swiss had a superb health care system, right?

  As she approached, Crazy Cat Lady gave us a smile—warm and disconcertingly normal. I was reminded of Norman Bates of Psycho fame. I surveyed the drop again and tried to remember the safe falling technique I’d learned in that aikido class I took in college.

  She said something in German. We grinned helplessly.

  She said something in French. We kept grinning, saved by the language barrier.

  “English?” she asked.

  “Yep, English,” Lee said. “Sorry.”

  “How much do you wait?” she said.

  Wait? Wait for what? I wasn’t waiting for anything. I was going to pull my best Spider-Man moves and get the hell out of there.

  “We are having a party,” she said. “It is… How do you say?”

  Crazy Cat Lady and her companions conferred for a moment in French. I still wasn’t quite sure what was going on. My muscles tensed. I took a tentative sniff, checking for the telltale odor of feline urine.

  “A bachelorette party?” asked Lee.

  “Ah! Oui. I have gotten married, so now my friends are having a party for me.”

  Lee and I each breathed an audible sigh of relief. Her friends snickered as they watched our posture ease and the color return to our faces. Well done, I wanted to say to them. The hat and bathrobe had been just weird enough to be a plausible outfit—for a crazy cat lady, anyway—and were therefore arguably more embarrassing than a more outlandish getup.

  “I need to kiss one ton of men,” said the bride. “So how much do you wait?”

  Ah, weigh, not wait. We told her, then offered, in the European manner, two cheek-pecks each.

  “Thank you!” the group called as they marched on toward the men playing chess.

  “That was… interesting,” I said after a long moment of silence. I could tell that we were both thinking the same thing. We had been longing for our exotic Contessas, our Hollywood love stories come to life. We had been counting on my guidebook to be our talismanic wingman. And now, on our last day together, in a deeply off-kilter way, it had provided a skewed version of wish fulfillment.

  In the strictest, most literal sense, we had both kissed a mysterious woman in the ruins of an Old World castle. This is true; we can pass the polygraph test.

  And yet.

  “Lee, man,” I said. “That was not the Contessa I had in mind.”

  Lee and I spent our final night together eating inferior, overpriced Thai food and attempting to replicate a grainy print of four photos that Mom and Ann had taken in a train station photo booth in Innsbruck. Their expressions are partially obscured behind mustaches and bouffant hairdos that Ann drew in later—“had to disguise ourselves to avoid the dirty old men of all ages that abound here,” sh
e explained in her accompanying note—but there’s no hiding their general delight. Mom’s eyes have a coy gleam in one of the photos, transforming her expression from innocent to mischievous. As I glanced at the photo before Lee and I went off to take our own, I did a double take. I knew that look—not from her, but from someone else. I’d seen it recently. Where? Who? I stared, I puzzled… and I laughed: it was Lee’s trademark, that knowing glance that placates and cajoles and urges ever onward in the spirit of adventure.

  Which brings me back to the previous evening, after the fondue. I, too, had worn that expression for once.

  There are no pirate bars in Zurich, at least none that we could find. It would have been the ideal send-off for Lee but, alas, this ain’t that kind of city. Instead, we settled in for the evening in an ideal neighborhood bar: cozy, casual, but with a subdued elegance. The space was just slightly bigger than the bar itself, a curving oak slab with little ornamentation aside from the rough bevel worn by countless wrists and forearms brushing against it. A bowl of limes sat at one end and the bartender—a middle-aged woman who seemed to have come straight from a day job in middle management, her attire and manner all business—periodically plucked a few of the emerald spheres from the stack and made mojitos with all the precision of a proverbial Swiss watchmaker.

  I noticed the rum she was using: it was a brand I didn’t recognize. We may not have found a pirate bar, but the pirate within me suddenly perked up. I wanted rum. Mystery rum. Potentially illicit rum. Actually, I wanted the glowing Bolivian booze that Lee had tried one night in Amsterdam—I had whimpered at the sight then, but was more than ready for it now. But this would suffice.