William and Jean were my fellow dancers this time. American couple, sixtyish, he stocky and studied, she gamine and gleeful. I brandished my book as Jean readied the camera.
“I remember that—that was my era!” William beamed after the photo was done. “Five dollars. Yeah… you could do it back then. I never did it, but I know people who did. Now five dollars will get you… what?”
“In Vienna? A couple of pastries,” I said. “Or a handful of postcards.”
I offered William my book and he paged through it, a perplexed grin on his face all the while.
“It’s so funny that you use the book as a photo prop,” Jean said. “Will you take a picture of me with my book?” She waved a new Fodor’s guide.
I snickered at the warmth of her sarcasm, then realized that she was completely serious. She handed me her camera and struck her pose, the Mozart statue behind her, the book in her hands, her lips spreading in laughter.
After less than a day in Vienna, I already felt like I knew how to navigate the city, not just geographically but culturally. I ordered food without getting flustered. I had halting conversations in something similar to the German language. I instinctively knew which direction to head when I got off the tram in an unfamiliar part of town. I never got lost.
Turns out if you do things the hard way, relying on your wits and not much else, well, at some point the hard way becomes relatively easy. It was a sudden, amusing realization, one that I recorded in my notebook, in enormous letters: I HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT.
During the course of the day, I had several internal dialogues that went like this:
“Okay, so take the U3 three stops, then walk in the direction away from the park and go about two blocks, then take a right and walk until you just start to see the canal in the distance, then take a left on the next major street… and the restaurant should be right around there.”
A quintessential tourist trail scene: historic
architecture, whimsical fountain, didgeridoo
didgeridoo-playing backpackers. As seen on just
about every street in every major European city.
Shouldn’t you check the map a few more times? Or at least keep it out?
“Nope. Not necessary.”
Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Really?
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
Oh. Well… all right, then. Carry on. You’re starting to sound like those girls in Paris.
“I know. Pretty great, huh?”
Except I really wasn’t feeling triumphant. I was too busy moping and battling an oncoming cold.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing like being sick in a foreign country to make you feel like a traveler, not a tourist. It makes the world seem less different, somehow, the culture and sense of place reduced to a scrim, hazy and two-dimensional and undistinguished. The colors are desaturated, the music muted. You become myopic, your daily existence limited to an inward struggle just to get by—you are utterly yourself, not a character walking through a set. You don’t care about checking off the sights. You just want to find a damn drugstore, maybe a doctor.
Between the cold and the jadedness, efficiency was my new priority. No gawking, no lingering, just get through my Frommering obligations:
Restaurant OK, Frommer’s “best spot for basic low-cost meals (the hurried and unextraordinary ones)”: gone. What’s there now? Oh, either a bank or a coffee shop or a convenience store. Or possibly a club advertising “GIRLS” and “TRIBUTE TO MICHAEL JACKSON.”
The Danube: not blue, despite my mother’s gleeful postcards to the contrary.
Swimming area in the Danube: replaced by a riverfront amusement park with forty trampolines (I counted, grumpily).
One authentic café was now a Chinese restaurant.
Another was a tobacco shop.
Another was an S&M gear shop. Really.
There were churches. They were gray and stone and tall.
There were bakeries. They sold pastries. They were fine.
There were parks. They had trees and statues.
There were people. They wore clothes. Some smiled at me. Some frowned. Most didn’t notice me.
I blended in. Everything made sense. It was easy. It was boring.
So what did I do? I blogged about it, of course.
The journey of a thousand miles now begins with setting up a travel blog—it’s practically obligatory these days. My mother has one. So does my godmother. They’re so ubiquitous that some of the titles comment on this very fact: Just Another Travel Blog, Another Damn Travel Blog. It’s the new version of the living room slide show, except now you don’t have to wait until you get back home to bore your friends.
I went into the center of town the next morning and found an Internet café.
“Do you have wireless Internet?” I asked the man behind the front desk.
“No, I’m sorry,” he replied. “You have your own laptop?”
“Yes.”
He leaned forward for a moment, thinking, then sprang from his seat, speaking in warm, exclamatory bursts: “Come! Easy solution! We will take a cord from another computer! And put it into your laptop! Like wireless but with a wire!”
Problem solved.
I opened my email with the shaky hands of an addict. William, the man I’d met at the Mozart statue, had already sent me a message.
The guy at the desk asked me my name. I told him as I logged on to Facebook.
“A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I am ——.” But I wasn’t listening—I was already pulled into my friends’ online banter: comments on the latest news, who went to a party last night, who ate what for lunch. If the Internet café guy were American, he would be named Billy; I’m sure of it. So let’s just call him that.
Let’s be clear about this: Email is great. No denying that. It helps you keep in touch. Ditto blogs. Ditto social networks. Ditto cell phones. I doubt that I would have stayed in touch with William had we met a generation ago, our disparate ages and interests creating a chasm that neither of us would have particularly cared to cross if not for the easy bridge-building of email. Blogs bridge even more distant gaps, allowing friends of friends and even total strangers into your travels and travails.
That’s all fine and good. What’s jarring, as Billy might have noted just now, is when that outside community takes precedence over one’s immediate surroundings, when we chat with friends back home and say that we’re bored and not meeting any interesting, eccentric locals… while ignoring the guy sitting a few feet away from us, trying to strike up a conversation.
“If you have an opportunity, you can visit my brother’s souvenir shop,” Billy said.
“Maybe later,” I said. To my Facebook friends, I typed, “Doug is in Vienna, being stalked by Mozart.”
Of the people who would read that, I knew many even less well than I knew Billy. But they were friends, damn it—it said so right on the screen: “Friends.” Friends whom I could sort into lists or tag in photos. Friends who could “like” my travel witticisms, giving a digital thumbs-up for all of our other friends to see, eliciting more digital approval. Billy, being in real life, lacked all of these features.
“The shop is close to here,” Billy said. “The best prices in Vienna! Sharon Stone went there.”
“Uh-huh.” I opened Twitter and reported my Mozart stalkers there, too.
“It is not a pressure,” Billy said. “It is just an offer, if you are looking.”
“Okay.” I saw that my sister was online, so I opened up Google Chat and told her about the Mozarts.
There is no off button on modern life, not really, not for many of us.
A wide body of recent research, articles, and books have tried to untangle the cognitive and cultural implications of our wired-in era, including Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which persuasively argues that the Internet scatters our attention and makes our thinking more superficial. More data points do not
equal more knowledge. Multitasking is a great way to get many things done poorly.
For travel purposes, disconnection helps you appreciate the strangeness of a foreign land or the ineffable wonder of a Montmartre sunset, which has a tendency not to hang on for just a sec while you finish your important email. It’s not just the remote or awe-inspiring places that deserve our full attention, though—it’s also the beaten path, where finding those small moments of joy and lingering bits of beauty can take as much effort as tracking an elusive animal. You already have all kinds of overload and messages thrown at you here—why add to the discord with your own digital dissonance?
My mother surely had distractions when she wrote her letters, but they weren’t on the paper. They were in her surroundings: traffic, birds, people, smells. They were of the place. They weren’t drawing her out of her surroundings; they were pulling her back in. That’s the key detail, the difference between writing a letter and writing an email or a blog post. We’re disconnected from everything but the screen.
“You like Vienna?” Billy asked.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“Where are you from? America?”
“Yes, Minneapolis. In the middle.”
I went back to Twitter to see if anyone had replied to my brilliant bon mot.
Some neuroscientists think that even the anticipation of email effectively rewires our brains and reduces our focus; we’re never fully in the moment, in the place. We’re so worried about what we might be missing on the screen that we miss out on our surroundings. Interestingly, my mother had her own version of this. Each day, she trekked to the local Thomas Cook or American Express travel office in anticipation of mail (and to get money—she didn’t have a credit card, and there were no cash machines). If there was none, she’d be sure to include a complaint in her next note to my father. Frommer even includes “American Express Area” as a neighborhood in many cases, listing the nearby shops and restaurants in the expectation that you’ll spend a decent amount of time there during your daily mail-and-money runs. (Incidentally, this is a good reminder not to get too worked up about how commercial travel has become. Already was: in the 1960s, much of the Grand Tour ran through one company, American Express, from your package tour to your traveler’s checks to your communication back home.)
At least Mom knew that when the mail run was done, that was it for the day. There was no refresh button.
“Oh, I know Minneapolis!” Billy said. “It is near Chicago. I have a friend in Chicago! It is cold there.”
Yeah, what was the weather like back home? Thanks for the reminder, Billy. I typed in www.weather.com.…
“Yeah, it’s cold in Minneapolis,” I said to Billy. “Colder than Vienna.”
“Yes, Vienna is nice right now. I like Vienna! If you want any information, I can tell you. I like to help the visitors!”
“Uh-huh.” Good idea, Billy: I should do a search on “things to do in Vienna when you’re bored and jaded.” I could hear Frommer tut-tutting, though, so I resisted that particular temptation. I went back to Twitter and Facebook to see if anyone had commented on my comments. Not yet. What was wrong with people? Refresh.
One thing that technology hasn’t changed, at least not as much as you might think, is the content of our communication back home. It may be more frequent and in a different medium, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the thoughts themselves are more scattered or less articulate than they used to be.
It’s easy to rant that in our modern era of text messages and email and blogs, we’ve lost our literary flair or even basic literacy; our correspondence has become ever more abbreviated, ever more vapid, devoid of the innate poetry and profundity that gilded every sentence we wrote just a few years ago. Ah, the delusions of nostalgia. As much as I’d like to pretend that everything my parents wrote was dramatic and intriguing and elegantly phrased (and written in iambic pentameter, with quills, on fine vellum), the truth is that they often scribbled quickly, without concern for spelling or capitalization—as with a text message, the goal was basic communication, not lyricism. The content followed suit. “Gee whiz, Sil, nothing out of the ordinary has been going on for the last couple of days” my father wrote in a letter to Vienna (they both called each other “Silly,” or, shortened, “Sil”). “I know you’ve heard that all to [sic] often, which would sound like life is dull, which it is not at all. In fact, it is not even really routine.… Let me see. What was my point.”
Notes like that were pretty common, actually. In fact, that’s a bit more lyrical than some of the letters—some were pure stream-of-consciousness, pithy non sequiturs that read exactly like a modern Facebook or Twitter feed. Even more than travel or love, Mom and Dad wrote about the mundane minutiae of the day-to-day: missing library books, enrolling for classes, Dad’s impending air force enlistment, a bus strike in Minneapolis, and Dad’s current projects in architecture school. The foundations of everyday life but not much of broader intrigue; more small talk than storytelling.
No, it’s not the pure content of our communication—per se—that has changed most. It’s the audience and the immediacy and the nuance of the presentation.
Mom often drew little flowers next to her name or wrote tangential comments along the side of a card. She sketched sheep and churches. Her longer letters spanned several days, frequently with comments on how her mood had changed since the earlier part of the letter—without a delete key, she left everything in, allowing her mood shifts to unfold on the page. Her handwriting was shaky when she was on a bus, large and loopy when she was trying to express a particularly important idea (usually, “I LOVE YOU”). She wrote on postcards, on wine labels, on tickets, on paper bags, on toilet paper, all adding an extra element of foreignness. An email looks the same no matter where you send it from.
The doodles and surfaces and handwriting—sometimes including the intriguing addition of comments from a mystery companion; you won’t find that in a blog post—tell the story beyond the words, adding intimacy and intricacy and sense of place. There’s more texture, both literal and figurative, which gives them all the more resonance.
In a 2010 poll of travelers conducted by the website TripAdvisor, a mere 11 percent said they still wrote postcards. Aerograms are even more endangered: the U.S. Postal Service stopped issuing them a few years back, as did Germany’s Deutsche Post and others. According to the U.S. Postal Service’s annual survey of households, personal correspondence has been on a downward trend since the late 1980s—in 2009, the typical household received 0.9 pieces of personal correspondence each week, down from 1.6 in 1987.
Today, “Sent from my iPhone” is the postmark of our times.
I moved on to the Minneapolis Star Tribune website, skimming the headlines: political squabbles, sports scores, human interest stories. Click. I read things I would never give a second glance if I were back home, idly following one link after another. What else was I going to do? Sit in another park, look at another church, eat another kebab?
We’ve forgotten how to be bored. We’ve forgotten how to fill the idle moments by, well, wandering a park or looking at a church or eating a kebab or making idle chitchat with a stranger without wishing we were instead reading our favorite blogs or checking our email. We want information; we want contact; we want it now.
What’s most striking about our modern connectivity, in terms of travel, is when it also makes us forget how to enjoy being confused and have some common sense and just make it up as we go along. We’re never really out of our element if we don’t want to be. People joke that social networks like Twitter and Facebook are just a bunch of people posting what they had for breakfast, but I’m more annoyed by all the people who ask, “What should I have for breakfast?”
Descartes 2.0: I crowd-source, therefore I am.
How about that place right there in front of you? How about asking someone on the street? How about realizing that you can wander into a dumpy restaurant and have a horrible meal… and still get someth
ing out of it, a story, a friend, a quiet moment to yourself?
Constant connection to the lifeline of friends and family and Google Maps and TripAdvisor is the twenty-first-century version of Temple Fielding’s two suitcases, briefcase, and raffia basket. The mentality is the same: there’s no place like home, especially when I’m on the road. The burdens of baggage are not limited to suitcases and backpacks.
I understand the appeal. I understand that something—namely, security and comfort—is gained. But there’s nothing wrong with not having all of the answers or with being a bit uncomfortable or lonely, completely unable to contact anyone you know. There’s nothing wrong with returning home still confused—in fact, there’s probably something wrong if you don’t.
The point is this: the most important travel app is the off button. And the most important travel guides are some basic common sense and open-mindedness and willingness to go with the flow and trust the Goddess Serendipity.
I knew what I was supposed to do now: hit my own off button, talk to Billy, be charmed by the eccentric local. I popped a cough drop and told myself I’d do it in a few minutes.
After someone emailed me or commented on Facebook.
Refresh.
When I finally went back into the real world, I found that Mozart was still following me, but so were the doctors. It actually wasn’t very hard to find them, because Mozart was correct: they were everywhere. Easy to spot, too, with bright blue messenger bags slung over their shoulders. The bags had a graphic of a Ferris wheel—the iconic feature of the historic Prater amusement park—and white type reading, “EUROPEAN RESPIRATORY SOCIETY.”
I followed a group of about a dozen doctors—Maltese, German, Portuguese—onto a train, hoping we’d end up at convention headquarters. I could do this—the New Me, the Travel-Enhanced Me, could outfox some lowly convention center employee and score a ticket. Right? Of course! I pumped myself up, trying to recall every lung-related term and tidbit I could recall from ninth-grade biology class and pediatrician visits for my childhood asthma: pulmonary, cough, wheeze, trachea… those little things inside the lungs, what were they called? Aioli? No, that wasn’t it.…
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 18