“Ever had that?” I asked Lee, pointing to the bottle. The label read “Havana Rum—Añejo Reserva.”
“Never seen it before,” he replied.
I did the mental calculation: Havana meant Cuba meant embargo meant illegal back home.
“We’re having it,” I announced. “A round of shots of forbidden rum. You know you want it.”
Lee demurred.
“Oh, come on, sidekick,” I said. “It’s illegal! We can’t pass this up!”
My own impish, coercive grin made its full debut. Lee met it with a bemused squint and a half-suppressed snicker.
“Spirit of…,” I started.
“I thought you might go there. Let’s do it.”
Vienna
Mozart Didn’t Blog
The trappings of the old Austro-Hungarian
Empire are faded by now, and the great rococo
buildings of Vienna are weatherworn and chipped.…
The mood of the city is like an old Nelson Eddy film,
gracious and slow, courtly and polite. It can be the
relaxing mid-point in your European tour.
—Europe on Five Dollars a Day
I boarded the train to Vienna the next day in a funk. Lee was gone. Who would I talk to without him? He’d dragged me out of my shell, and I was pleased to be here—but I wasn’t sure how long I’d last before retreating to my cozy bubble of self-doubt. There was even a downside to all that confidence I’d built up: a weary, unsettled feeling from all that headlong travel. Grand Tour Fatigue Syndrome. Motion sickness of the soul.
The Eurail pass—sold only to non-Europeans and one of those early tourist-boom catalysts, created in 1959—helps facilitate both the ease of travel and camaraderie. Best feature: to use it, you just step onto a train. If you miss the one you wanted, get the next. If you make a new friend and decide to grab lunch in Innsbruck on your way to Vienna, you can; just get on another train later in the day. The pass is technically a first-class ticket, but I usually rode second class, heeding the wisdom of Arthur Frommer—and pretty much every travel writer ever—that this is where you’ll find the conversation, the intrigue. Right now, though, I headed straight to the quiet plushness of first class. I wanted to sulk and steel myself for the wingman-free journey ahead.
The view, too, would cure me, or at least distract me. The landscape looked like a model train set wrought large: more fog-shrouded peaks and placid Alpine lakes with music-box churches on distant shores. Even the grittier tableaus had a certain charm: one cottage had a bright red decommissioned ski lift gondola in its backyard as a gazebo of sorts.
Yet these sights did nothing for me; the touristic wonder lay dormant, surfacing for a few brief moments but never fully roused. It was every bit as stereotypically picturesque as my arrival in Florence had been, but that felt like someone else’s life—an awestruck rube I didn’t recognize.
The train attendant interrupted my brooding. “Ticket?” he said. I pulled my pass from my pocket and handed it over with barely a glance. By now, this was routine for me.
“Tickets?” the attendant asked the family sitting on the other side of the aisle. There were five of them, three generations of a family: grandparents, parents, and a daughter about my age. The daughter sat directly across the aisle from me; the other four were in two pairs of facing seats just behind her. They dug through their bags, fumbling and apologizing all the while. I knew the feeling. That had been me a few weeks earlier.
The attendant muttered again as he looked over the tickets. “You speak English?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” the mother said.
“You are in zer wrong car.”
I knew this feeling, too—I’d also been there, seated in areas that turned out to be reserved. Lee and I had pinballed around trains, constantly being booted by attendants or passengers brandishing reserved-seat tickets and annoyed looks. This family’s problem, though, was slightly different.
“Zer tickets are second class,” the attendant said. “Zis is first class. You must move.”
“No, we have first-class tickets,” the mother replied. She appeared to be in her midfifties and wore a fiery flicker in her eyes and a loose scarf around her neck. The family was of Indian descent and the grandparents both had a lilting accent, but they all lived outside of Washington, DC, they later told me, and the parents and daughter were American through and through, a typical suburban middle-class family.
“No, zer tickets are first class in Austria,” said the attendant, an R. Crumb character brought to life, with a droopy brow, a splotch of a mustache, and a too-small uniform hat perched atop his head. “But still we are in Switzerland.”
“How long until we get to Austria?” the mother asked, her tone indignant.
“Perhaps one half hour,” the attendant said. He fidgeted nervously. “Please, you cannot stay here.”
“We have all our bags here.” The father sighed, gesturing to the five enormous suitcases and assorted smaller bags bulging from the overhead bins and the compartment at the end of the car. “It’ll take us”—he paused, doing the calculation—“a while to move. But all right.”
“No. This is stupid.” The mother rose from her seat, her index finger jabbing the air. “We’re not going. That’s stupid. We’re almost to Austria and we’re not moving all of those heavy bags. The car’s almost empty—look!” She gestured to the seats around us, nearly all vacant, then shoved her hands to her hips.
The attendant scowled and said, “I will find someone to help, since you do not speak English.” He disappeared.
The mother looked at me, her expression pleading for confirmation that someone else had heard that. “I speak English just fine!” she said, her tone half laugh, half yell. She took a deep breath and shook her head in frustration. “So…,” she said. “You’re also American?”
“Yep,” I replied. “From Minneapolis.”
“Oh! I lived there for three years!” She turned to her daughter. “He lives in Minneapolis! Isn’t that amazing?”
“Small world,” the daughter muttered. She looked like she wanted to jump out the window after the scene her mother had just made.
The attendant reappeared with another train employee, a guy who had pushed a snack cart through a few minutes earlier.
“You are coming from India?” asked the snack cart guy, a wiry man of about twenty-five. “I am, too.” Then he launched into a plea in Hindi—or what I assumed was Hindi. The mother’s knowledge of the language was only marginally better than my own; her parents translated quietly, and then she replied with about three words of halting Hindi before switching to English.
“I’m sorry to get you involved,” she said to the snack cart guy. “But we’re not moving. And if he wants to talk to us”—she flicked her hand toward the attendant, who had been watching the conversation with a sour look on his face—“I really do speak English, a lot better than him, and way more than I speak Hindi.”
The snack cart guy sighed. “I have German and Hindi and little English.” He shrugged to his colleague and they both walked away. A minute later, I looked out the window and saw a sign. We were in Austria.
The stereotype of the tourist follows two threads, based on age: the young version has dreadlocks, an iPhone, a backpack, a Che Guevara shirt, and a trust fund; the old version has cargo shorts, an enormous camera, white walking shoes, a rolling suitcase, and a 401(k). They are both white; they are both well funded. I have a mental image of the two facing off in an Old World square, their respective cameras—the sleek phone and the oversized DSLR—aimed at each other, a digital duel of mutual disgust. It could be a New Yorker cartoon, with a caption of the classic Evelyn Waugh quip: “The tourist is the other fellow.”
More and more, though, the other fellow looks increasingly less like those stereotypes, not necessarily Caucasian or particularly well-off. My new friends were hardly cultural anomalies—what’s interesting, I suppose, is how uninteresting they were, just
a few more tourists who didn’t look like me.
The original Grand Tourists may have been British—recall the ribald Thomas Coryate—but in the 1960s, the typical “far-ranging” international tourist was American, notes Maxine Feifer in her book Tourism in History. Not all Americans, it should be noted—white Americans. Appealing to Americans of varied economic backgrounds had been part of the Marshall Plan’s goals in promoting tourism; ethnic diversity, though, was a different matter. “While aiming for a society free of class divisions,” Christopher Endy writes in Cold War Holidays, “Marshall Planners did so within the limits of an idealized America of native-born whites.” Travel ads of the day skewed the same way, as I found when I spent a long day paging through 1950s Life magazines at the library, looking for travel advertisements—the only nonwhite faces were servants or “noble savage” types in ads for African safaris. Still, Endy says, Europe held an almost sacred status among many middle-class African Americans—over there, they could travel more safely than in many areas of their own country.
Wanderlust knows no cultural boundaries, and as the budget-travel boom continued into the 1970s, Americans abroad were joined by other tourists, often British, Japanese, or German. Then, as now, the key to understanding the next wave of tourists was to follow the money, to look to the rising economies. These days, that means China, India, and Russia. The Chinese government began allowing tourist visas to Germany in 2003 and to the rest of Europe the following year. By the end of the decade, some 2 million Chinese tourists were visiting the Continent annually. In 2008, the UN World Tourism Organization, in collaboration with the European Travel Commission, drafted a special report titled The Chinese Outbound Travel Market. The next year, they issued similar reports for two more rapidly growing sources of tourists, India and Russia.
Many of the new travelers are drawn to specific places they’ve seen or read about in the mass media. A familiar story. Southern France is particularly popular with Chinese tour groups, the Economist recently noted, “thanks in part to widely available translations of Peter Mayle’s book A Year in Provence [a recent catalyst for American tourism as well] and in part to a slushy Chinese television miniseries, Dreams Link, which was filmed amid the lavender fields and walled citadels of the Midi.” And in 2010 Switzerland Tourism began a campaign to draw Indians to the Alpine areas that had been backdrops in popular Bollywood films.
When you get right down to it, the formula for the rise in tourism is essentially the same across cultures, a single timeless and universally applicable equation:
Expanding middle class + pop culture influences + increasing ease of travel = tourist masses
I chatted with the family from Washington, DC, until they got off in Innsbruck. I was again all alone with my view and my moping. I arrived in Vienna, boarded a tram toward my hostel, and moped some more. As we passed a manicured urban park—all sculpted hedges and monumental fountains—and the glorious neoclassical parliament building, with its grand columns and statues of noblemen on horses, I had just one thought: “Man, all these damn cities look the same. I am so over columns and horse statues and oh-so-orderly parks.”
In Florence and Paris, hiding out in my room had been my preferred treatment for any ailment—anxiety, fatigue, hangnail. I’d eat an energy bar and have a long, delirious chat with my old Frommer guidebook and call it a night around eight. But now I was past that, and staunchly determined not to turn back, especially since my hostel was the sort of grime-tastic place that only Random Backpacker #22 could have loved. Frommer put this hostel in his “starvation budget” category, noting that for much of the year it’s a college dormitory. There’s a slight shudder to his description, the subtext being that, well, you can stay there, and it’s supercheap at eighty cents for a single room… but you’d have to be pretty desperate. Still true, that, although the price was also still fairly low, about twenty-eight euros.
I had a realization: misery loves company, but most of all, misery loves beer and nachos.
I was going to go native in the Tourist Culture. Yeah, Tourist Culture—there is one. Though tourists may be coming from ever more widespread places and walks of life, the truth is that once they’re on the road, they start acting in remarkably similar ways, all seeking acceptance in this society of outsiders. They—er, we—tend to go to the same places (Eiffel Tower, Venice), eat the same foods (kebabs, pizza), have the same rituals (“Scusi, could you mein photo take? Merci por favor?”), the same native dress (khaki pants, practical shoes—white ones for the novices, black for the advanced). It is indeed a unique culture, but one to which we belong only temporarily. It’s a culture of transience and halfway points, located somewhere between our actual, native cultures and those in which we have booked ourselves for a stay and a look-see.
So I went to the Tourist Culture native hangout: an Irish pub. They’re a case study in contrived authenticity and theme-park culture. They can seem nearly as ubiquitous as McDonald’s—I’d spotted them in every city so far—and every bit as formulaic, with the Chieftains on the jukebox, dark wood paneling on the walls, and Guinness in every glass. (There’s a corporation largely responsible for this phenomenon; it’s called, no kidding, the Irish Pub Company.) Contrived, sure, but the success of the formula lies in its coziness and comfort and intimacy, trading on the Irish reputation for hospitality. Done right, the Irish pub feels more authentic, more enchanting, more Old World than its beaten-path surroundings. It’s the tourist’s shelter from the tourist storm.
I sat at the bar, figuring Lee would have insisted. I chatted with the bartenders—they were English, but never mind that—and my fellow bargoers from all over the world. A small television in the far corner broadcast a soccer game. The bartenders and Aussies cheered for one team; a pair of Indian twenty-somethings rooted for the other; the Americans cheered whenever someone scored; and the two guys beside me at the bar alternated between chatting with me in Irish-accented English, talking to each other in German, and bellowing at the television in the universal language of referee hatred.
For my dinner, I ordered the dish that seemed most authentic and appropriate for the context: a pint of Guinness and a platter of nachos.
They weren’t very good. Which was probably to be expected.
When you’re feeling Old World–weary, it doesn’t help when Mozart starts stalking you. I do not mean that I kept hearing his music. I mean that everywhere I went the next day, there were guys dressed as Mozart. Many of them. It was like Amadeus meets West Side Story.
The one by the Mozart statue was especially menacing. He had the manner of a back-alley drug dealer, all shifty glances and corner-of-the-mouth sales pitches, though his goods—like those of his clones—were symphony and opera tickets.
“I can get you in, but you must buy now,” he said, one hand clutching a seating chart while the other adjusted his ill-fitting powdered wig.
I looked at the prices on his chart and thought of my languishing bank account. “Probably still too much for me,” I said.
“You cannot come to Vienna and not go to the opera!” Mozart insisted. “Please, I will find you a seat. My prices you will like.”
“Maybe I’ll just go to the box office tomorrow,” I said, rather suspecting that Mozart’s “tickets” might involve a Sharpie and a piece of cardboard.
“No, tomorrow is sold out. Is a very special performance and the doctors have purchased the tickets already.”
“The doctors?” I asked.
“Ja. A confederation meeting. Twenty thousand physicians—the ones of the breathing?—are in Vienna. They buy many tickets.”
I burst out laughing and dug into my bag. Mozart offered a hopeful half smile and scratched under his wig. He was disappointed to see my hand pull out not a wallet but my trusty Frommer book. I pointed to the Readers’ Suggestions section:
Tickets for the evening’s performance at the Staatsoper are often unobtainable anywhere. Fortunately, there’s nearly always a medical convention in Vienna, a
nd where there are doctors, there are opera tickets. A well-dressed American can walk up to the registration desk at any of these conventions, urbanely say, “I did not order my tickets in advance, but do you have any?”, and usually get the finest seats available, in all price ranges.
I turned to the cover and showed Mozart the date. “Many doctors even in 1963.”
“Yes, it is true,” he said. “Many doctors. Twenty-five thousand of cardiologists last week.” His lips curled into a sly smirk. “Your—how do you say? Tactic? Saying you are a doctor, it will not work. If you want tickets, I will sell you. The show tonight is very good.”
But I knew what I needed to do.
Later. I would find the doctors later. First things first: I wanted a photo of the Mozart statue. I had taken one out on the street, my favorite Not-So-Flattering Photo yet. It shows a sidewalk stand selling “KASEKRAINER—HOT DOG—FRANKFURTER” and a transit shelter with a large sign reading “FUCK IT! LET’S PARTY!” Between them, you can see a genteel park surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence topped with spikes that look like pernicious fleurs-de-lis. Behind the fence, framed between the two sidewalk structures, is a majestic man carved of white marble. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer of some repute.
I wanted a photo with him, though, not just of him in his discordant surroundings. Photos are the currency of the Tourist Culture, but its most sacred rite is the Tourist Dance: hold out your camera, smile sheepishly, point to yourself. Half the time the other person is already performing the same gestures to you. Sometimes you don’t even speak a word to each other until the end, at which point you both guess the other’s language and say thank you. Occasionally you find that you both guessed wrong—you said grazie in your American accent; she said merci beacoups with a lilt that you took to be… Turkish, maybe? And sometimes you say it in the same language and you both laugh and have a conversation.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 17