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

by Douglas S. Mack

  This train ride was taking a long time, but that was a good sign. Surely it meant we were heading toward a far-flung convention center or hotel. When we got off the train, I let the doctors get a good distance away before I started tailing them. We walked for a few minutes and then, there it was, looming in front of us.

  The Ferris wheel. The iconic one emblazoned on their bags. Tickets cost 8.50 euros. I couldn’t justify it, particularly given how wobbly and ancient the thing looked. My newfound adventurousness had its limits; this seemed like an especially ignoble and probable way of meeting my demise in Europe.

  Question: Have you ever been to an amusement park in the off-season? I spent the whole time thinking of synonyms for “creepy”: disturbing, menacing, nightmarish, ominous, eerie, frightening, hair-raising, shuddersome, direful, sinister. All appropriate. Half the rides were closed; the other half were either rickety or disturbingly forlorn.

  The fun houses were open, with their elaborate facades—an array of fiberglass dinosaurs here; an army of the undead there—and their shifty-looking operators slouching in ticket booths, ignoring the muffled screams that I sincerely hoped were recordings. A sad-looking father watched his sad-looking daughter ride a sad-looking pony around in circles, led by a sad-looking handler.

  Frommer had highly recommended a trip here: “At least one evening should be spent at the famous… Prater, which is best known for its ferris wheel, the largest in the world.…You’ll get quite a charge out of the Viennese touches that are added to the normal carnival attractions.”

  The only distinctly Viennese touches I saw, alas, were the old-timey graphics on the Coke machines. There was one old beer garden, the Gasthausgarten, but it appeared not to have been in operation for years. Tall weeds had taken over the space, making the vintage streetlamps scattered throughout look like metallic flora. I have no doubt that if I’d stared for a few more moments, I would have spotted ghosts waltzing through the weeds.

  Back in the tourist center of town, I looked around for a restaurant and found that one of Frommer’s Berlin recommendations was now here. It was called Wienerwald, though despite what one might suspect from the name and the Germanic proclivity for encased meats, it was not a sausage emporium. It’s a small chain of restaurants, Frommer says, which “you ought to try at least once: they are one of the great success stories of post-war Germany,” having made roast chicken, once an expensive delicacy, available to the masses.

  My chicken came with a red-pepper sauce that was spicy and sweet, lively and sating, hitting all the right notes. I gobbled everything down in an embarrassingly short amount of time. Here, finally, was a meal worth writing home about and a reason to appreciate Vienna; my mood started to lift. The place was full and, judging by the voices, the customers seemed evenly split between locals and tourists. No wonder, I thought: it was the last holdout of a once-thriving chain of glamorous cafés. It deserved to be packed.

  “That was really good,” I told the waiter in all sincerity as he took my plate. I pulled out my book and showed him the description of the restaurant. “It was in Berlin in the 1960s, but I didn’t see it when I was there. But now I found you here in Vienna.”

  “Ja,” the waiter said.

  “The food was very good,” I continued. “But now this is the only one? The only bistro?”

  The server gave a hollow laugh and walked two steps away, then turned back. “Bistro?! Nein. There are many, all over.” As he rattled off a list of cities, his spiky hair seemed to droop in wary condescension. “It is nothing special,” he said in a hushed voice. “Really. Just for normal people.” As he turned and strode toward the kitchen, I heard an exasperated moan.

  I grabbed a menu from the table next to me. I’d been so hungry that I hadn’t really taken a look at all the details.

  Yeah. My favorite meal in weeks. My triumphant find, a rare historic place still open and still patronized by locals and not overtly kitschy or overpriced… was basically the Teutonic Applebee’s. Of course it tasted good—it had been focus-grouped and engineered and exquisitely formulated to hit all the right notes while keeping costs down.

  But you know what? There were locals there. And it was a place that had interesting historic roots. In that sense, it was plenty authentic, at least as an emblem of modernity and the evolution of a place.

  It made me laugh, once again, at the notion that, as Frommer says, authenticity is inversely related to price: the less you spend, the more genuine the experience. Inherently. I can’t vouch for the truth of this in 1963, but it’s manifestly absurd today. The cheapest readily available meal in most European capitals is a doner kebab. Or a pizza. Or a sandwich. Spend lots at a real bistro and you’ll find plenty of fussiness, plenty of upper-crust cuisine—and also, presumably, some traditional and authentic, if pricey, meals. Smack in the middle, you may well find yourself in a place like Wienerwald. In any case, you’ll find locals eating in all of these restaurants.

  Authenticity has no price tag. I thought again of my imaginary dreadlocked traveler and cargo-shorted tourist having their face-off, both thinking the other shallow and silly and flat-out stupid—inauthentic—for spending too much or too little.

  And then I sighed, paid my bill, and set out into the night to commune with the centipedes at the hostel.

  “By this time, you’ve had enough of the Germanic countries,” Frommer says to close the Vienna chapter. “The train for Italy leaves from the Sudbanhof.”

  I was counting the hours.

  Venice

  Brave New Old World

  As you chug along, little clusters of candy-striped

  mooring poles emerge from the dark; a gondola

  approaches with a lighted lantern hung from its prow;

  the reflection of a slate-gray church, bathed in a

  blue spotlight, shimmers in the water as you pass by.

  This is the sheerest beauty, and it is a moment

  that no one should miss.

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  The overnight train to Venice was an agonizing endurance test spent in a cramped compartment with two gargantuan Italians who took up most of the space—leaving me contorted in the corner—and were to snoring as Pavarotti was to opera. One of the most miserable, sleepless nights of my entire life.

  And totally worth it.

  Because I don’t care who you are or how foul your mood, you cannot be anything less than awestruck and elated upon arriving in Venice in the long light of daybreak. In E5D, Frommer says the best time to arrive here is at night, “when the wonders of the city can steal upon you, piecemeal and slow,” but I’d have to respectfully disagree. The best time is in the morning, when the soft rays of the rising sun paint the town a rich honeyed tone cut through with deep, dramatic shadows. The city was just waking up, the piazzas scattered with early risers reading newspapers, the cafés with bleary-eyed espresso drinkers. And all the tourists were still asleep.

  The sense of arrival is without peer. Best in the world, for my money. You step out of the train station and you are on the… Grand… Canal. You stare, trying to take it all in. You gaze past the darting boats—not just gondolas but a whole ecosystem of skiffs and dinghies and delivery vessels. There’s UPS; there’s the grocer’s supply boat; there’s the barge piled with building materials. Steps away: the luminous white stone arch of the Scalzi Bridge. Beyond it: a classically Old World town in a wholly incongruous setting, as though a giant pulled up a city and casually tossed it into the sea, where it somehow landed fully intact, and its citizens just shrugged and said, “Yeah, we can make this work.”

  There are times on the tourist trail when you see something and think, “That’s it?” (Manneken-Pis, Munich’s Glockenspiel), and there are times when you think, “Whoa, that’s it!” (Eiffel Tower, Berlin Wall), and then there are times when you just don’t think. I’d had that feeling at the David in Florence. And now here.

  And when your brain finally starts functioning again, the super
latives and incredulous thoughts flow like a faucet cranked open. You think what my mom thought, what she wrote on a postcard, words that countless tourists have surely repeated verbatim: “It’s real! It looks like Venice is supposed to look!” You can be nowhere else on the planet.

  Venice is famously composed of two interlocking islands, but it’s actually a jigsaw puzzle of some 118 pieces, each its own discrete island. Canals everywhere. Bridges everywhere. In other words, amazing photo ops everywhere. The place begs to be overdocumented. I was happy to oblige. I basically kept my finger on the shutter-release button as I slowly made my way through the zigzagging chasms of buildings, history-steeped slot canyons where the sky was reduced to a brushstroke of blue above the encroaching walls. Click. Click. Click. Bridge: click. Clothesline: click. Interspersed through the crowded streetscape were Baroque, Renaissance, Arabic, and Byzantine architectural styles (click, click, click, click).

  Eventually I found myself in an enormous plaza. I blinked at my sudden reintroduction to the sun, and my eyes took a few moments to reconcile the shapes sprawling in front of me.

  Ah, yes. This must be it: the Piazza San Marco. There was Saint Mark’s Basilica, Byzantine and opulent, its domes and mosaics like a carton of Brobdingnagian Fabergé eggs. There were the long loggias framing the other sides of the square. There was the famous acqua alta, the high water covering large portions of the piazza, though only half an inch deep right now. And the tourist crowds. The day was still young, but they were starting to gather.

  They appeared to be most interested in the pigeons scattered in large clusters around the piazza. Specifically, the tourists were stalking the birds, tiptoeing into the middle of the flocks as though preparing to catch them. My sleep-deprived, Old World–addled brain slowly churned through the possible explanations. I knew the Venice Biennale was going on—was this some bizarre piece of performance art? Had I stumbled upon a nascent and awful tourist trend of capturing living souvenirs? I watched as two women stopped in the middle of one flock and raised up their arms as though impersonating scarecrows. Seriously: what was this? Forget Sweatin’ to the Oldies; this was tai chi with The Birds. Several pigeons flew up, perching on the women’s arms, shoulders, and—I couldn’t help but shudder—heads. The women called out to their friends, who laughed in delight, then raised their cameras to their faces in unison.

  Ah. It all made sense. To be a tourist is to pose for silly photos.

  I heard a flutter of wings and felt a weight on my arms. A pigeon chortled in each ear. Anywhere else—anywhere—I would have yelped and gagged and flailed. But here… oh, all right. I cautiously handed my camera to a woman who was watching me with amusement. She took my picture and passed the camera back to me. On cue, the birds flew to her.

  I walked back into the shadows. Exploring, meandering, taking too many photos, oohing and aahing at every new canal or street scene.

  As the day wore on, the crowds started to build, first in fits and starts and then full-on. The quiet places became fewer. I got lost, yes—to be here, as a tourist, is to be forever lost, because the canals and streets conspire to confuse with their twists and turns and landmarkless uniformity. It turns out, though, that being lost is not so fun when the condition is perpetual and when every time you stop to ask for directions, the only people around you are fellow clueless tourists. It was as though we were all part of some collective effort, perhaps as part of the Venice Biennale, to create as many canals of humanity as there were of water.

  Finally, after wandering for the better part of an hour, I found a tranquil piazza. Four kids kicked around a soccer ball; two old men chatted on a bench. Ah, bliss, I started to think, and at that precise moment I heard a pair of American voices echoing from the passageway behind me. Two women rounded the corner, then stopped a few feet from me.

  “I need a beer,” said one.

  “Okay, well, let’s go to the Hard Rock.” The woman tapped on her cell phone screen. “But how do we get there?” More tapping, staccato and agitated. Then a frustrated grunt: “Ugh. I can’t get a signal.”

  At least Venice was still pretty, I told myself. But even this couldn’t last. Beauty has diminishing returns; familiarity breeds not contempt so much as fatigue. The canals were heartbreakingly lovely and picturesque for approximately six hours and forty-three minutes—and then, in an instant, I was over them. They had became mere nuisances, obstacles blocking my path, forcing me to walk two miles instead of twenty feet, when all I wanted to do was go to that restaurant right over there, for goodness’ sake.

  I thought back to Amsterdam, a few weeks earlier. I was happier then. The Old World was still new. Those canals were wide enough that you could actually appreciate the scene across the way—there was some breathing room. There were walkways along the sides, not just bridges over the water, as in Venice. Houseboats and trees created a layering effect. And there, the waterways were the spots of calm and respite, all the more enthralling because they were grace notes offering contrast to the rest of the city. Here, in Venice, they are the city.

  Pity the claustrophobic, the agoraphobic, the aquaphobic: this must be their worst nightmare.

  I thought back to the pigeons. They should have been my early-warning sign, a signal that my Grand Tour Fatigue Syndrome had not, in fact, been cured. Because though the gregarious birds were kind of neat at first glance, the more I thought about it, there was something just not quite right about a place where even the pigeons are willing to pose for tourist photos (and ask for a small fee, maybe some bread). When it comes to this point, which is the true pest: the corpulent, cooing creature… or the bird?

  Enough, I thought. It was dank and crowded and now that I had seen the canals… now what? It was a case study in all the ways that tourism can really, seriously mess up a place. This wasn’t a city; it was a tourist playground. It was sinking at an ever-faster rate (twenty centimeters in the last century) while the waters rose (and will likely keep rising, due to global warming). The smog from cruise ships was quickening the deterioration of the buildings. What once was a bustling hotbed of artistic expression had become a place of pure consumption, where everyday people doing everyday things were an elusive, endangered species. Perhaps Frommer and my mother and everyone who followed them really had ruined it all. Maybe the travel snobs, the tourist haters I loved to hate, actually had a point. This realization only upped my ire. Seriously, screw this place.

  Oh, I know what you’re thinking: you would love to be in Venice right now. And I’m going to whine about being there, in the charm capital of the world?

  Damn straight.

  Thing is, Venice is a one-trick town. Sure, it’s a hell of a trick. But really: six hours and forty-three minutes. I defy you to remain interested longer than that.

  I had three more days.

  I wanted to like Venice. I really did. The woman who rented me the apartment where I was staying—all of Arthur Frommer’s recommendations from E5D were, once again, closed, booked solid, or far beyond my ever-dwindling budget—was simply one of the sweetest people I have ever met, and desperate to make sure I was enjoying her beloved hometown. She had the sorrowful eyes and earnest smile of someone who has been routinely let down by the world but who hopes that this time will be different. Every time I saw her, I offered my assurances that I was enjoying the apartment, which was true. And then I changed the subject if she asked about anything else.

  “You took the boat tour?” she asked. She had helped me make arrangements.

  “Carla, the apartment is beautiful,” I said. The boat was small and crowded, with a tinny sound system and dirty windows. I had found that I could both see and hear only if I sat in a precarious position on the edge of the boat, leaning out over the water, praying I wouldn’t get conked by a passing vaporetto.

  “And the food is good?” Carla asked, adjusting the sunglasses perched atop her flowing, sandy mane. She was effortlessly glamorous in that Italian way.

  “Carla, the view out the wi
ndow—it’s unbelievable!” I replied. I wasn’t going to tell her about my lunch at a Frommer-approved place a few steps off the Piazza San Marco. Twenty euros, though that did include bread and calculatedly indifferent service, plus a pasta sauce that could have done double duty as an adhesive.

  The acqua alta and temporary boardwalks in the Piazza San

  Marco, which allow dry passage through the square and, most

  of all, provide a spot to sit and rest and complain about all

  those other tourists.

  But, yes, the apartment was wonderful. It was on a quiet side street—a passageway, really. In the stone slab above the entrance to the street was a carving of a man holding a coat of arms. All of its icons and text had long since faded to oblivion, along with the man’s nose. I came to think of him as both the friendly face welcoming me home at the end of the day and a cheap but effective metaphor for the city itself, its enlivening details eroding into obscurity. He was a Venetian Dorian Gray.

  Inside the apartment were terrazzo floors, antique furnishings, a canopy bed, and a wall of windows just a few feet above a canal—if my arms had been just a bit longer, I could have touched the water. It was everything I could ask of a Venetian apartment, elegant and vaguely mysterious. Outside, my mood was bitter and aggravated; in here, it was melancholy and wistful—unhappy, still, but in a more inward-looking way.

  As darkness fell that first night and I’d already had my fill of the city, I headed back to the apartment to wallow in my unhappiness and read a few of my parents’ letters.

  My mother didn’t go to Venice in 1967. But she and Ann embarked on a second Grand Tour in the summer of 1975, and this time they made it here, toward the end of their trip. My father—now out of the air force, working for the National Park Service in Washington, DC—had joined them for the first leg of their journey. They all went to Paris and Normandy together, and then Dad returned home.