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

by Douglas S. Mack

  (I strongly suspect that the Frommer of today would wince at his earlier comments on “girl-watching” and, had he been on our tour in Munich, may well have rebuked Nigel for his boorish behavior.)

  My mother encountered more than a few Nigels during her travels, most notably in Italy (like those lustful teenage boys who followed her back to her guesthouse in Florence) but elsewhere, too. In a postcard from Munich she told my father, “We are sick of ‘dirty old men’ as Ann calls them. Last night a Swiss student saved us from an Italian. We feel like skipping Italy at this point.” Her letters and postcards are, alas, full of such comments and stories.

  But times have changed. Sexist comments and caddish behavior are less tolerated in modern society and the tourist trail is safer for women.

  I think. Maybe. Not being female, I can’t say for sure.

  As it happens, Elizabeth Gilbert makes similar observations in her 2006 blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love: “I ask around [Rome], and everybody here agrees that, yes, there’s been a true shift in Italy in the last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it’s a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or the inevitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it’s just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and grandfathers.”

  Guidebooks have also caught up with the times. Europe on Five Dollars a Day, as I’ve mentioned, didn’t have much in the way of tips, tricks, and general travel advice, and it had no specific guidance for women travelers, solo or otherwise. (There were travel guides for women back then, though, including Fodor’s Woman’s Guide to Europe, first published in 1953.) The 2011 version of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door, on the other hand, begins with 442 pages of “Travel Skills,” followed by just 252 pages of where-to-go-what-to-do content. Steves offers chapters for travelers of color and gay travelers and nine pages for women traveling alone, including this priceless tip: “There’s no need to tell men that you’re traveling alone.… Lie unhesitatingly. You’re traveling with your husband. He’s waiting for you at the hotel. He’s a professional wrestler who retired from the sport for psychological reasons.” I can imagine my mother, in her breezy but assertive manner, using that line while glowering at countless dirty old men throughout the Continent.

  All that said, I still rather hoped to see Lee woo the Contessa. In a discreet, debonair, nonsketchy kind of way, of course. But still. I was once again starting to think of my journey in terms of Sundance film plots and travel-memoir tropes and… well, they would have made a very cute, narrative-enhancing couple. It would have fit nicely with my new embrace-the-cliché attitude. Or maybe she would rebuff his advances, saying that she was more interested in his friend, the shy one with the funny old travel guide. That would also work.

  But the Contessa had disappeared.

  “I’m sure she’s gone back to Italy to prepare for the lavish wedding,” I assured Lee. “The aristocratic guest list alone takes a while to plan.”

  We hadn’t seen her since that first evening, and now Lee even had a question for her: we needed directions to one of Frommer’s favorite restaurants whose precise location was unclear.

  The Contessa, however, was not playing along, and the guy who had replaced her, a punk rocker with a paunch, just didn’t hold the same conversational appeal. So we headed off to find some other company. And drink.

  We had no historically driven motivation for going on a beer hall tour. Oh, sure, I could point out that Frommer gives the Munich chapter a subtitle of “Beer and Wurst at Bargain Rates.” I could note that when my mother was here, even she, who hates beer, felt obliged to sample the suds. But no. We—and I do mean both of us this time, not just Lee—mostly just wanted to meet people and gulp down Munich’s biggest clichés. We would be missing Oktoberfest by just a few days, so this would have to suffice as a stand-in.

  The hostel bar where we gathered was a good start, as clichés go. It was very much the archetypal backpacker hostel, the modern equivalent of the cut-rate accommodations (and alcohol-enabled socializing) that Frommer recommended in Europe on Five Dollars a Day. The bar got bonus cliché marks for its other highly typical features: the currency from around the world taped to the pillar in the middle of the bar, the nonnative bartenders (all British, in this case), the Jägermeister shot dispenser… and, alas, the many travelers ignoring the conversation and focused on their laptops, updating their blogs or Facebook statuses.

  The key touch, though, was the guy holding court at the end of the bar. I didn’t catch his name, but he seemed to have wandered off the set of the backpacker-dystopia movie The Beach; call him Random Backpacker #22. He wore a tattered black T-shirt and a look that was at once vacant and spiteful. “Twenty-five euros is the maximum I will pay for a place to crash,” I heard him grumble, “but that’s pushing it.” He bragged about spending less, about spending nothing, and about the sketchy fleabags and shacks and ditches he’d slept in. He took Frommer’s signature axiom—that the less you spend, the more genuine your experience—to its farthest, filthiest extreme, apparently mistaking adversity for authenticity. He’d done Paris; he’d done eastern Europe; he’d done Southeast Asia; he’d done everywhere; he was over it all.

  I hoped that if I kept listening, I’d hear the phrase I’d been expecting for weeks but which had so far proved elusive. I strained to eavesdrop through the rising buzz of conversation and clinking glasses in the now-crowded room. I waited and waited… and there it was, with maximum haughtiness and impeccable timing, right as our guide began to round us up, in that Archetypal Hostel Bar a block from the Munich train station: “You gotta be a traveler, not a tourist.”

  Lee and I fell in with three other twenty-somethings doing solo tours of Europe. Annie from Johannesburg seemed aloof and bookish at first glance but quickly asserted herself with a cutting wit and an astonishing enthusiasm for beer. Jacob from Edmonton tried to keep pace with her, though it was quickly clear that his stomach was no match for his fervor. He was an engineer by occupation and a hockey player by passion, though in some cruel twist of fate, he had the brain of a hockey player and the brawn of an engineer. Sam from “a small village in northern England” provided the hipness—red glasses to go with her scarlet hair; yellow-and-white-striped sweater—and the pop culture commentary. It was she who brought up John Hughes, the director, who had recently died.

  “The story of my youth: Sixteen Candles,” she said.

  “And Breakfast Club,” said Annie.

  “Yes!” the rest of us said in unison.

  We all chattered: Wasn’t that just like our high schools? Pretty much, we agreed, despite having grown up in four different countries, on three different continents. (Though, admittedly, all middle class and white.)

  “To John Hughes,” Sam said, raising her stein.

  “To John Hughes!” we toasted.

  “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was always my favorite,” I said, confessing that I’d sort of wanted to be like Ferris.

  “Everyone wants to be Ferris,” Sam agreed, “but I rather prefer Cameron. He’s more realistic—that’s more like what we are most days, isn’t it?”

  Well, yes, I thought.

  “He has a bit of neurotic charm to him,” Annie said.

  And that, I thought.

  The five of us quickly became inseparable, not that the others in our group seemed to have much interest in socializing. Three guys from Los Angeles, traveling together, mostly kept to themselves, smoking nervously and apparently intimidated by their surroundings; one confided that he’d never even been on an airplane until a few days earlier. I empathized with them and realized, in a rare moment when we pulled them into our conversation, that they thought I was a badass, proper-noun Traveler. Meanwhile, Alejandro from Argentina and Miyu from Japan had apparently just met but were already inseparable, making for an incongruous couple, he gaunt and bearded, a stoner Jesus; she tiny but with a spunky, rock-star bearing. (Not surprisingly, Random Backpacker
#22 had stayed behind. “Already done it,” I’d heard him mutter as we headed out the door.)

  At the second beer garden Lee jumped up on a picnic table, stein in hand. Our beleaguered tour guide had nearly given up on trying to explain history and culture to his increasingly inattentive charges but had made one last gallant effort, telling us about Bavarian drinking songs. Lee was eager to share his knowledge on the subject from his tabletop pulpit.

  “I’m going to teach you a song called ‘Jesus Can’t Play Rugby,’” he said. “It’s about the, um, reasons Jesus can’t play rugby. Like, ‘Jesus can’t play rugby ’cause… his headgear is illegal.’ And then we all sing, ‘’Cause his headgear is illegal, ’cause his headgear is illegal.’ ”

  Alejandro broke his tractor-beam gaze into Miyu’s eyes and looked at Lee. “Yeah, that’s funny, man,” he said, his voice a blues-singer rasp. “I like this song.”

  “Okay, so…,” Lee began. He flashed that conniving smirk to our gathered group, and we all fell under his spell, even the guys from L.A. Lee swung his mug like a frothy metronome. “Jesus can’t play rugby ’cause… his dad fixed the game…” He paused and gestured toward us, imploring, conducting. We laughed and sang along, “’Cause his dad fixed the game, ’cause his dad fixed the game.”

  “Again!” Lee crowed. “Jesus can’t play rugby ’cause…” He pointed to one of the Californians.

  “Uh… because…”

  “His team’s too big?” someone suggested. We were too far into the evening for quick thinking or creativity. We all laughed and Alejandro offered a few more raspy affirmations (“Yeah, man!”) and Lee maneuvered himself down from the table.

  “You were like Ferris Bueller up there,” I said approvingly.

  Sam and Annie agreed—and decided that I was Cameron. Given their earlier comments, I didn’t mind. They, like Lee, decided that what I really needed was adventure and fun. And since there was no red Ferrari at hand for me to drive around with reckless abandon, drinking excessive quantities of German beer would have to suffice.

  “C’mon, Cameron, finish it!” Sam cried, eyeing my stein, which I was thinking of, optimistically, as half empty.

  “You can do it, Cameron!” Annie grinned as she examined her own nearly empty stein. Next to this was another mug, this one long drained.

  I pointed at her accomplishment. “How is that possible at this point?” I asked.

  “Johannesburg is high above sea level,” she replied. “I’m used to drinking at altitude. So having a few beers here is nothing, dude.” She said “dude” ironically, with an American accent. Then she downed the rest of her glass in one long gulp.

  Jacob lowered his head and stared at his own nearly full stein. “I might be done,” he moaned. “I have… failed.”

  Annie beamed.

  It is at this point where my memories of the night are blurred to the point of wholly unreliable. I’ve read other travel books where authors comment, by way of indirectly indicating that they maybe possibly drank too much, that their notes for the evening become nonsensical or entirely illegible. I would like the record to show that I never reached this point. No, I had other people do my writing for me, as designated note takers. I don’t recall this, but the handwriting in my notebook suddenly becomes unfamiliar. So I can tell you that we talked about South African vs. English accents. We discussed my declining motor skills, specifically my inability to spin my pen around my thumb. And then, on the last page of the notebook, there’s this poem by Annie:

  I wish I were sober

  No, I don’t

  Then the story might be better

  The second time around.

  So maybe Lee liked to go a bit overboard sometimes after all. Maybe I did, too. Comfort zone successfully escaped—or rather, redefined. Cliché successfully embraced.

  The next morning, the sunlight cut through the window with a laserlike intensity. I buried my head under my pillow and wondered why it seemed so bright and why there was a horrible throbbing sensation in my head—it felt like one of those street performers was blasting a didgeridoo in my frontal lobe. I peeked out from my cave and stared at Lee. He, somehow, looked worse.

  Grumbling, I trudged to the bathroom and cranked the shower handle toward C. A blast of boiling lava poured out instead, and I swore I saw my melted skin circling down the drain as I frantically turned the handle the other direction. Either way, though, mission accomplished: I was awake.

  Burned and then iced and washed and cleansed and freshly clothed, I stepped back into the room feeling… completely fine. Great, even. The didgeridoo was gone; the sunlight had dimmed. There were signs of life in the other bed, as well. “Do you have any Tylenol?” groaned the Lee-shaped object tangled in sheets. I dug the bottle from my bag and handed him two pills and a glass of water.

  “Thanks,” Lee mumbled. “If you want to head out on your own, that’s fine. Otherwise you might be waiting all day. Wake me up again when it’s time to get the train to Zurich.”

  I headed to the northern part of town, to a neighborhood called Schwabing. I was intrigued by Frommer’s description of it as “the Greenwich Village area of Munich… in some respects, it’s zanier and more colorful than anything New York offers.”

  What I found was… well, pretty much just that, at least compared to the tourist center.

  I walked for blocks and blocks, on side streets and the main drag, and didn’t hear English spoken once. There were bistros and hip record stores, guys on skateboards, women on bikes (their scarves flowing behind them; I fell in love with every one), teenagers doing parkour stunts in a plaza by the U-Bahn station, and a cluster of old men playing chess on a massive board, with three-foot-tall pieces, in a convivially overgrown park. An orderly row of bicycles stood locked in a rack, and I noticed that balanced within the frame of one of the bikes was a Saran Wrap–covered bowl full of a freshly made salad topped with a careful arrangement of sliced tomatoes. You won’t find that in a tourist hot spot. I pictured a German beatnik on the way to a potluck. I wondered if I could tag along.

  On Occamstrasse, I searched for restaurants Frommer recommended in E5D and found none. But the street and the neighborhood were just as he’d promised: quiet and cheerily funky. (Though I was later told that the true bohemian, hip areas today are elsewhere, in the Glockenbach and Westend neighborhoods.) Even so, when I stopped at a bakery for a pastry, the woman behind the counter took me in stride, not at all surprised to see a tourist here.

  The area fit a template that I’d noticed in Charlottenburg in Berlin, Jordaan in Amsterdam, and other just slightly outlying neighborhoods: a place where tourists were welcome but relatively scarce, the middle ground between the roads less traveled and most trampled. Call it the frontage road to the beaten path. This, I suspect, is what many tourists are actually after: the just-right combination of foreign and familiar, everyday local life and tourist amenities. A sense of place and community, plus easy access to the landmarks, but without tourism’s most tawdry trappings, none of the crowds and souvenir vendors and musicians and touts that are as interchangeable as the chain stores lining a suburban American highway.

  I sat on a bench in a lush pocket park, feeling very much at home. “This is great, Arthur,” I caught myself saying aloud. “Thanks.”

  I pondered how it was that Schwabing had retained—or, perhaps, reclaimed—much of its charm since the 1960s, avoiding being overrun with tourists and the attendant kitsch.

  My one-word answer: Oktoberfest.* Maybe you’ve heard of it. Little festival involving drinking songs and men in lederhosen and women in dirndls and pretzels and schnitzel and inadvisable amounts of beer. Major tourist bait. And, crucially, on the other side of the city from Schwabing.

  Oktoberfest started in 1810 as a celebration for a royal wedding, continued as an agricultural fair the next year, and began to take its current form as a beer-themed carnival when rides were added in 1818 (because there’s no better chaser for a liter of suds than a roller coast
er). Frommer’s ’63 guide says not a word about it, which I find curious given that he subtitles the Munich chapter “Beer and Wurst at Bargain Rates” and writes at length about beer halls and the city’s love of a good time. It was certainly popular enough back then: in 1950, Oktoberfest visitors consumed 88,294 servings of chicken and 1.5 million liters of beer, according to official statistics. Seems like a pretty big deal to overlook, right? Perhaps. But those numbers are paltry compared to their 2010 counterparts: 488,137 servings of chicken, 7 million liters of beer. (“I’ve no idea why people drank that much,” an Oktoberfest spokeswoman told Spiegel Online that year. “They were simply thirsty.”)

  Today, some 6 to 7 million visitors come here every year to eat, drink, be merry, and observe, at late hours, the correlation between the loping, giddy pulse of a polka song and the particular rhythmic swaying of the world when you’re drunk. Such is the reputation of the festival and its consequences that the Australian government sets up a temporary consulate in Munich during Oktoberfest specifically to help all the Aussies who lose their passports or find themselves in beer-induced dire straits.