“We are one of the finalists for the 2016 Olympics,” Ramón said. “The vote is in a few days, so they are setting up for an event to maybe get the attention of the International Olympic Committee.”
Spain’s tourism boom traces its roots to the rebuilding of the country after the dictator Francisco Franco—the man most responsible for the “economic backwardness of Spain and the poverty of its people” that Frommer observed—fell from power in 1975. But the Barcelona Olympics are widely credited with being Spain’s big coming-out party, the catalyst that launched the country into the upper echelons of tourist destinations. (Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in 1997, helped the trend along.) By 2007, Spain drew more tourists than any nation in the world other than France, although it has since fallen to fourth place, with the United States and fast-rising China rounding out the top three in 2010.
So now, Madrid wanted to claim some of that charm for itself, to reclaim its spot as Spain’s cultural capital.
Ramón’s brown eyes brightened as he explained, “We are trying to show the world we want this—we want them to come here.”
As we pedaled off to see the rest of his beloved, reawakened city, I recalled Frommer’s comments about the country’s impoverished “quaintness” and his wish for a better, more prosperous future for the Spanish people. And I thought, happily, Mission accomplished.
Like Spain, the broader travel landscape has changed as well since the mid-1970s. Mass tourism has started to follow what was once the hippie trail into Asia and parts of Central and South America, and then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, parts of eastern Europe have seen tourist influxes (Prague is a notable example). Some of the counterculture travel attitudes and methods have also become mainstream—the United Nations designated 2002 the International Year of Ecotourism. In 1988, Frommer released a new guidebook appropriate for the times, Arthur Frommer’s New World of Travel, written with his daughter, Pauline. With a focus on ethical and offbeat travel—anticipating the rise of ecotourism—the book’s suggestions are the anti–Grand Tour: homestays, voluntourism, yoga retreats, and “cerebral camping.”
By the mid-1990s, the next big shift in travel would occur, but this time it wasn’t about where to go or any particular attitude toward travel but how you planned and how you kept in touch. The new tool was, of course, the Internet. And one of the travel sites at the forefront was Arthur Frommer’s Outspoken Encyclopedia of Travel, launched in 1997. This became Frommers.com, which remains one of the most prominent travel sites on the Internet. And, yes, the company now has a smartphone app, too.
On the agenda for the next day: the Prado, which Frommer lauds as “smaller and better arranged than the Louvre.” It’s one of the few museums or landmarks in Madrid that he talks about at length—allocating it about half a page—and I figured I was ready to get one last art overdose before I left Europe.
As I walked down the broad, thrumming Gran Via, I saw a mass of people clogging the street—tens of thousands, surely, maybe more.
“¿Qué está pasando allí?” I asked a woman. What’s happening over there?
She cast me a confused look. “Para los Olímpicos, ¿no?” She pointed above my head and I glanced up to see a small banner hanging from the light pole—from every pole, actually, on both sides of the street. It had the Madrid 2016 “Ciudad Candidata” logo—a multicolored hand—and official slogan, Tengo una corazonada (roughly, “I’ve got a feeling”). The crowds were heading toward the intersection Ramón had pointed out the day before; this was Madrid’s last big push to win its Olympic bid.
You know what? I thought. The Prado will be here forever. Let’s party.
A smiling volunteer with a satchel full of white baseball caps and green sheets of paper handed me one of each and explained what was going on: we were going to create an immense version of the logo, a living mosaic. I could stand anywhere I liked, but I had to have the proper color of paper for the section. “Muy importante,” she said. We needed to impress.
I pulled on my hat and clutched my green placard and went to the appointed spot. In the next half hour, the crowd grew tight, tighter, tighter—news reports had a final count of four hundred thousand people, forming the largest mosaic in the world—with the mood never anything less than ecstatic. Here was their chance; here was their moment.
An emcee took the stage and riled us up with some party tunes. We sang along at the top of our lungs, about how we were the champions and about how tonight was gonna be a good, good night. We tried to do some sort of quasi-choreographed dance that everyone else seemed to know, but we were so tightly packed that we could only bump into each other and grin goofily and apologize and shout to each other that, yes, I love Madrid, and yes, this city’s time has come, and yes, we will—we will—be the champions! Tengo una corazonada…
The emcee yelled for silence and the whir of a helicopter cut the air like a drumroll. We’re gonna do this, the emcee said. Hands in the air, placards to the sky!
I couldn’t help myself: I reached into my bag, grabbed Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and placed it on top of my sheet. I glanced around, seeing if anyone had noticed. An elderly woman a few feet away had; she stared, confused. I gave her an apologetic wince-shrug-smile. She laughed and looked up and danced in place for the camera, and I did the same, yelling, hoping that if I wanted it badly enough, this dream, my dreams, our dreams, would come true.
Setting up for the Olympic bid rally in
front of the Palacio de Comunicaciones.
Four hundred thousand people showed
up—Madrid knows how to party.
I made it to the Prado, by the way. Sprinting. With twenty minutes to spare before it closed. I walked straight to the Goya section, finally catching my breath—and then feeling it pulled out of me as I surveyed the paintings and their haunting, ghastly, disturbingly beautiful depictions of war and tyranny. It struck me again—as it had in Berlin and, well, everywhere—that for all the faults of modernity, I’ll take it. Still plenty of conflict and discord in Europe to go around—indeed, whispers of uncertainty about the very survival of the EU followed me everywhere—and yet I couldn’t help but feel won over by that Spanish optimism. In spite of everything, the future’s bright. The past really wasn’t so great. No going back.
Back at the hostel, I sat in the lounge, reading E5D and realizing that I had precisely one place left to investigate. One. And then my experiment was complete. There was time to do it tonight… but a very cute woman had just sat down in the chair next to me. Arthur Frommer would have to get in line.
“Is that your guidebook?” she asked, flashing an incredulous smile. She fidgeted with her long hair, a shade lighter than her auburn blouse. Late twenties, I guessed.
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Following the footsteps of my mom. Lots of things have changed, of course, but some haven’t at all.…”
By now, I was accustomed to using the book as an icebreaker; I had my introductory spiel down pat.
“So where have you gone with it, then?” she asked.
“Oh, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Rome… all over western Europe. Ten or so cities.”
“You’ve been to all those places?” She sounded genuinely impressed. She kept playing with her hair absentmindedly, wrapping and then unwrapping her finger, her bearing a jittery incandescence. “I’ve always been a bit reluctant to travel. I taught for a while in Australia—just got back from there—but mostly I’ve only been in the English-speaking countries.”
“So what brought you to Spain?”
“I heard I could get a job teaching English and thought maybe it was time to get out of my comfort zone.”
I told her I knew the feeling, then added, “I’m Doug, by the way.”
“Ah, a good Scottish name!” I could tell from her accent that she was English.
“Don’t hold it against me,” I said, grinning.
“No, no, not at all!” she chuckled. For the first t
ime, she stopped fidgeting with her hair. “My father’s Scottish. Got lots of family up there. I’m Sarah McKay—another good Scottish name.”
We kept at it for twenty, thirty, forty minutes, the conversation dipping through travel and European history and our mutual Scottish ancestral roots and our favorite authors and our lives back home. It was the longest, best conversation I’d had in weeks, far-ranging and easygoing, both of us recognizing in each other a kindred wanderlust-stricken spirit beginning to emerge from a shell and eager to see more of what the world had to offer.
The hostel lounge was starting to get busy. I wanted to keep chatting, but we were both straining to hear. I discreetly rubbed the cover of E5D for good luck and put on my best I-know-we-just-met-but-I-promise-I’m-not-an-ax-murderer smile. I asked, “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink and keep talking?”
Time stopped.
I’d read enough travel memoirs, seen enough Sundance movies, to know how this ended, but I wanted to enjoy the moment. It was all I could do not to erupt in an enormous, cheesy, I do, I do grin.
Sarah’s hand went back to her head. “Oof, no, I really need to go take a shower just now.”
Wait! No! Wrong script!
Time stopped again, and I willed it to go back, back to two minutes ago, let me rewrite this; it’s not what was supposed to happen.…
Now she was looking down at the ground, a grimace on her face, practically pulling out her hair.
“Okay!” I squeaked. “Well, it was really nice chatting with you!”
I rushed to the door as suavely as I could, trying to outrun the sound of my heart breaking.
Really?! After all that?!
But, yes. Really. The Sundance crowds began filing to the exit. My last, best chance for a clichéd Hollywood ending was dashed by the clichéd brush-off excuse. She had to wash her hair.
And now I needed a drink.
I went to commiserate with Frommer one more time. The last place on my list was Casa Botín, E5D’s “big splurge” in Madrid. Frommer notes that it’s the setting of the final scene in The Sun Also Rises and adds, “It’s a pilgrimage spot for Papa [Hemingway’s] admirers, and yet it continues, almost unaware of its fame, to cook magnificently Spanish meals, unaccompanied by most of the tourist touches you would expect at such a shrine.”
I trust I do not need to say that this has changed—Don Ernesto is very much in the spotlight now. He is painted on the glass in the front window, seated at his typewriter, one hand grasping a piece of paper, the other a libation. Just inside the window is a framed certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records recognizing Botín—established 1725—as the oldest restaurant in the world.
It is, to coin a phrase, touristy. As I waited for a table, I heard a constant stream of American voices—including the “How are you, dear?!” exclamations that E5D warned about at Harry’s Bar in Venice—as well as various dialects of tourist English from across the globe. Very little Spanish. The host led me through the kitchen to a back room, where a table for four had been set for one, the silverware like tiny sticks floating on a white-linen ocean.
My mind raced back to Le Grand Colbert, the most uncomfortable meal of my life. Here was the sequel.
I thought about how, in a better-scripted world, Sarah would be sitting here with me.
And then I laughed. Because of course life doesn’t work out how you expect. Even funnier, though—and now the other tourists around me were staring at me, as I tried to stifle my snickering with my menu—was that I didn’t care about the brush-off. Truly. What the hell was I thinking, trying to shoehorn a sappy ending into this Not-So-Grand Tour? I couldn’t pretend that I’d had any profound, life-changing epiphanies these past few weeks, but if nothing else, I had learned to find amusement—even enjoyment—in those moments of being lost, both literally and figuratively. And the big reason I’d finally gotten to this point was that I had learned to fend for myself, both in awe of each new place and confident in my own ability to navigate it.
I’d noticed the confidence back in Vienna, but now there was something more, a jolting sense of ease with the world and, yeah, even myself. My posture had loosened. The thousand thoughts and anxieties clamoring for attention in my mind had not quite disappeared but had at least diminished from a fire hose of worry to a mere IV drip. The sense of always searching, without even knowing for what, had begun to vanish—not because I had any answers or had found anything but because I’d made my peace with confusion, with being a tourist in life.
My menu, I noted, was in Spanish. A quick glance around the room revealed that everyone else had an English version. At a tourist restaurant, they’d taken me for a local—funny, I thought, that at my moment of complete acceptance of my tourist status, I’d finally started to blend in.
And the food, my God, the food. A half carafe of sangria and cuchinillo asado, roast suckling pig—what Frommer ate, what Hemingway ate, what all the other happy eaters around me were eating. It felt like a dish of history, simple to prepare but rich in flavor—I could see why everyone came here, for this, and why they kept serving it just so, no fussy modern accompaniments or fusion remixes. I savored every bite.
On my way back to the hostel, I stopped at a quiet bar for a nightcap and to toast Frommer for our journey together. The bartender was scruffy but friendly, like Clint Eastwood trying to play a kindergarten teacher. He, too, greeted me as a local, in Spanish without a touch of wariness. But this soon became a problem, as it had throughout my time in Madrid. Because while my vocabulary is only middling, my accent is, apparently, pretty good. Everyone assumed I spoke fluently or was, in fact, a Spaniard—and then, once the conversation got going beyond the introductory salutations, they’d start talking at an astonishing rate, like an auctioneer on amphetamines, and my comprehension dropped to zero.
“Lo siento, no comprendo,” I said. I thought that the bartender had just said his name was José and then told his entire life story in ten seconds… but I wasn’t quite sure.
Better to explain my status, I thought.
“Yo soy un turista.”
José laughed and slowed down, and the conversation kept going, our roles established, my admission the balm that put us both at ease.
So now I was done with Europe on Five Dollars a Day. For good. The next day, I bought a few jamón ibérico sandwiches at a shop I’d stumbled across in the preceding days—thank you again, Goddess Serendipity—and made my way to Parque del Buen Retiro, the city’s sprawling, manicured central park, to soak up the lingering rays of Iberian sunshine before heading back to the frigid autumn in Minnesota.
In a week, I would be on a cruise ship with my parents, my sister, her husband, and their one-year-old twin boys—a family vacation with the express intent of exposing the next generation to travel at an early age. Compared to solo backpacking in Europe, a cruise with the family would be, you might say, a slightly different travel experience, and I was already starting to brace myself for the jarring transition. Between now and then, life would be a rush of unpacking and readjusting and then repacking—in a roller bag, not a backpack—and heading back out. (Also within a week, the 2016 Olympics would be awarded… to Rio de Janeiro.) This would be my only time to think.
If you read more than a handful of books and articles about tourism, especially those that take a critical angle, there’s one quote you’ll find over and over. It’s this, from Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image:
The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.”
It’s a common sentiment: proper travel is active, while shallow/inferior/clichéd travel is passive.
Now, I do think that passive travel has its place, that cruises and Walt Disney World and time-shares provide a much-needed escape for many overworked people who want to use
their hard-earned two weeks of vacation time relaxing. All work and no play make Jack a dull traveler, and what’s so wrong with that?
But what interested me more, as I sat on that bench watching the world—well, Madrid—pass by, was this: if you go by the active/passive definition, then the destination is irrelevant. If mindset is all that matters, you can go to Walt Disney World as a traveler and to the most remote parts of the globe as a tourist.
By that definition, what I had just done was to be a traveler on the beaten path. In every city, I had wandered until I got lost, and then I wandered some more. Once I overcame my early fears, I chatted with souvenir vendors and bartenders and others who saw the tourist experience from the other side. I was a tourist, no doubt, but active, always searching for what was beneath the surface. And I’ll note again that I was hardly unique in this regard.
And that, I think, is the most important legacy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day: it’s not about where you travel—on the beaten path, along a frontage road, or where no tourist has been before—but about what you make of it. Find your own way.
Arthur Frommer, after all, was the one who said to the masses, You can do this. You don’t need a lot of instruction, really. Just get out there and make it up as you go along, guided not by rules or numbers but by an insatiable curiosity. No matter where you go or what your budget, you’re bound to meet interesting people, learn about other cultures, see some cool things (and some not-so-cool things—but that’s part of the experience), and come back alive and invigorated and slightly-but-in-a-good-way confused.
Tourism has always been, to some degree, an act of status, a statement that you have the time, money, and ability to go abroad. With the budget travel boom of the 1960s, though, it exploded and fragmented, open to more people and more ways of showing off, including not just conspicuous consumption but conspicuous frugality. Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 23