Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day

Handwritten Letters Get Their Due: Notes For the Inevitable Trend Piece

2012-02-01T08:58:00.000-06:00

I.
When I go to check my PO box, I am literally running by the time I enter the building. My box is in the main post office in downtown Minneapolis, a long, squat building like an Art Deco fortress on the Mississippi riverfront. It was built in 1934 and has a gloriously cavernous, three-hundred-plus-foot-long lobby, and striding in there is like entering a movie set, honest to God, a dead ringer for city hall in a Batman flick or a brutal capitalist's corporate headquarters in an Orson Welles film, what with all the terrazzo floors and inlayed marble details on the walls and the little business-windows with brass bars and surrounds, like the kind you see at old-fashioned train station ticket counters. Stretching the entire length of the lobby is an immaculate brass light fixture, supposedly the longest in the world.

Even today, when some of those little brass-barred windows are boarded up, the place is beguilingly grand, alive with that elegant, Machine Age swagger that makes Art Deco so alluring. It's a thrill, it's a high, to walk in there. No lie.

But for me, it's not the aesthetics that make my heart race, at least not just the aesthetics. Most of all, it's the task at hand.

I've got mail. Real mail. Letters and aerograms and postcards that begin, "Hello, stranger." And in our own ever-connected era--a truer Machine Age than any prior claimants to that title--that little bit of tactile, handwritten, hand-delivered personal communication is enough to make me sprint and punch the air and grin a big, giddy grin. (You think I am exaggerating for effect but somewhere, I'm sure, there are YouTube videos uploaded from the Minneapolis post office security cameras, soon-to-be-viral images of a bespectacled mail-nerd doing his happy dance.)

The fact that people--strangers--keep sending me letters, many of them with notes about how much they miss getting real mail, makes me realize that I am very far from the only one thinking about this or doing something to keep it going.

II.
This cartoon has been making the rounds on the internet. Various friends of mine and the Oxford English Dictionary, among many, many others, have posted it on their Facebook pages.

[original here]

Yeah. Exactly.

III.
At what point is a trend a trend? It's tempting to see an article about a topic you've been thinking about, or overhear a conversation about a thing that you yourself did just yesterday, and to conclude, ergo, I AM AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF A NEW AND POPULAR THING! This magazine story includes a recipe for molasses cookies! And that guy at the store had a bottle of molasses in his cart! And I ate a molasses cookie for breakfast last week! That's three data points! Quick, someone set up a Tumblr and call the Times and get a trend piece in the Sunday paper!

So I'm wary of drawing too many conclusions from my own biased, myopic observations. Nonetheless. There's something going on, the data points are widespread--the random people who write to me from the Netherlands and Bangladesh and Brazil (many of them young, I might add, lest you think this is just a nostalgic older-person thing) and the OED staffers and the esteemed New Yorker writers (hello, Roger Angell)--they're all over the place, people talking about letters and what a joy it is to send them and receive them.

Maybe it's a literary thing, specific to the bookish types whose days begin with Michiko Kakutani at the breakfast table and end with Gary Shteyngart in bed (... wait, that's not what I meant). People who love books, it follows, have specific romantic, wistful fixations on the printed word, and are probably--okay, damn near certainly--more inclined to hunger for handwritten letters, and to write them. There's certainly a common literary thread here.

Like: the publishing industry blog GalleyCat reported a few days ago that author Mary Robinette Kowal is launching what she calls The Month of Letters Challenge--starting today, she and anyone else who joins the cause will send at least one piece of Real Mail every day the US Postal Service is in operation in February.

Like: The Rumpus, that proudly idiosyncratic online magazine of culture--particularly the literary variety--has taken the nascent trend and run with it, in their own way. They're calling it Letters in the Mail. Five bucks a month gets you one every week or so.

Letter writers will include Dave Eggers, Tao Lin, Stephen Elliott, Janet Fitch, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Cheryl Strayed, Marc Maron, Elissa Schappel, Wendy MacNaughton, Emily Gould, and Jonathan Ames. Think of it as the letters you used to get from your creative friends, before this whole internet/email thing.

The lede from BookRiot's story on Letters in the Mail: "What's the next arena for literary foment? Try your mailbox."

But even if there is that bookish tinge to all of this, even if the most obvious data points come from this specific area of culture of which I am a more than part-time inhabitant, those data points, in the aggregate, arguably add up to something bigger, something more widespread. I fully support letters being the next arena of literary foment, but the more important thing is that they be more than just that.

IV.

Dave Eggers. Of course Dave Eggers is on that list--of course he's at the top of that list. Because, with all due respect, Mr. Eggers's very name has become a synonym for a certain aggressively earnest, calculatedly quirky, and--let's just say it--oft-grating flavor of modern culture. It's not that he isn't a brilliant writer (he is) and innovative publisher (ditto), it's that there's something uniquely maddening about Eggers-style culture, precisely because it wants to be so good for you, combining intellect with self-aware whimsy and then hard-selling it to you as a product, arch preciousness as packaged good.

And that's what kind of frightens me about the nascent rebirth of letters: I don't want this to be about nostalgia and wistfulness, alluring as they may be. I don't want this to be about affecting a specific pose, washed down with your neighbor's homemade craft absinthe to a retro-melancholy soundtrack of an intentionally-scratched EP by next year's South By Southwest darlings.

Letter-writing is about specific personal connection. That's the allure. I don't care if your envelope is made from a "Dukes of Hazzard" poster and the letter is about your inspiring corndog lunch with Rick Santorum. If you took the time to put pen to paper and shelled out forty-five of your hard-earned cents for a stamp, and made the effort to find a mailbox, I really do appreciate it. (Anthrax and epithets excluded, of course. Just to be clear.)

My girlfriend and I met on the internet but fell in love over letters. Handwritten, sometimes handmade, old-school letters. Even though we lived in the same city and saw each other in person all the time, we sent letters (still do--Maren, check your mailbox). Sometimes we go for walks and one of us will say, "Oh, we have to stop by a mailbox so I can send this letter to you."

VI.

Is it just nostalgia? Is that why I like to write letters? Is that why other people are writing letters?

VII.

In part. Maybe. But I don't think so. And I sure as hell hope not because to a large degree, nostalgia is a wistful appreciation of something lost forever--it's a sequestering of that place or thing into the realm of memory, not present-day reality. It becomes self-pity: I wish I were alive in that time, doing that thing. But as, oh, everyone who has commented on nostalgia has pointed out, it paints a pretty picture, but not at all an accurate one. (I like modern medicine, I like not living in a time when state governors literally stand in the way of desegregation.)

My parents also wrote letters to each other in their courting days. My mother did a European Grand Tour for ten weeks in 1967 while my father stayed behind finishing up architecture school in Minneapolis, and the two sent letters to each other every two or three days. They've kept every last scrap of paper--letters, postcards, aerograms--in shoeboxes (literally, shoeboxes) for the last forty-plus years. (For anyone new here: this blog started as a means for me to document my own journey in my mom's footsteps, using those letters. Read all about it in my book coming out in April!)

As much as I'd like to pretend that everything my parents wrote to each other was dramatic and intriguing and elegantly-phrased (and written in quill-and-ink, on fine vellum), the truth is that much of it just isn't particularly interesting or quotable. They had a shocking disregard for the narrative-enhancing needs of the son they would have fourteen years later and who would grow up to be a writer. They wrote pages and pages to each other, but much of it was like this, from a letter Dad wrote to Mom in Vienna:

Gee whiz, Sil [they both called each other “Silly,” or, shortened, “Sil”], nothing out of the ordinary has been going on for the last couple of days. 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. But the little things which make life interesting and wonderful seem trivial when repeated without the benefit of all the background. Let me see. What was my point. Oh, yes. In spite of its seeming—and necessary—sameness of school, work, and study it is not. I hope you follow, because compared to three months of travel this type of life could seem totally worthless, which it is not. Or maybe dull is a better word, which it still is not."

Or, just picking another letter sent to Vienna, there's this text-message-like note from Mom's sister, Susan, then a student at the University of Miami (all punctuation and spelling are hers):

speaking of the other u of m and homecomings and all that, yours was last weekend, and your friend and mine . . . yes, you know who, called . . . he was lonely for you . . . boy, was i sad for him . . . you wicked thing, what are you doing running around europe while he's playing solitaire on homecoming night? (don't you feel mean?) . . . anyway, i was really glad to talk to him, 'cause that was right when the plague was setting into me

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. Much of the content was, quite frankly, precisely like today's Facebook status updates: comments on the latest local news, who went to what party last night, who ate what for lunch. The foundations of everyday life but not much of broader intrigue.

VIII.

No, it's not the content of our communication that has changed. It's the audience and the immediacy.

A postcard or a letter goes to one person—maybe a household, at most. It can't be forwarded with the click of a button. It can't be read in an RSS feed or on a mobile device by the whole world.

Writing to my father in 1967, my mother often drew little flowers next to her name or added additional comments along the side of a card. She sketched sheep and churches. 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. Dad wrote on aerograms (those sheets that fold into envelopes; here is an aerogram template for you), on a long piece of drafting paper, on stationery from work. He sketched, too, including one card sent at the end of Mom's trip, with a forlorn Charlie Brown lookalike “welCOME BACK.” There was no concern for a catchy subject line. There were no links or embedded videos to pull the reader away. There were no ads on the side begging to clicked or pop-up chat boxes with salutations from bored friends-of-friends. It was not intended for a broad audience; it couldn't easily be cut and pasted or forwarded on to someone else. It was personal, the doodles and handwriting and surfaces providing an intimacy that blogs and e-mails simply cannot; it's the difference between dancing and lockstep marching or, more aptly, between a human and a machine.

IX.

The key, as I said, is a specific personal connection--and that's something that (I sure hope) knows no era and has no concern for trend. That's why my girlfriend, Maren, and I send letters to each other even though we see each other nearly every day--because it's a physical reminder of each other and our thoughts and our stories, a piece of ourselves that we can pin to a cork board or place on our shelves. It's a small handcrafted good that says, "When you weren't around, I was still thinking of you--and I made this for you."

It's the knowledge--or at least the presumption--that this particular person has written this particular thing to you. There's an implied intimacy there that can never be articulated in emails precisely because it is unspoken--it's about the act as much as the content. The effort and literal expense (money-wise but also time-wise) of sending a letter make a world of difference. This physical item was in the other person's possession, and now it is yours. There's a transfer of ownership--a gift of sorts, a memento. (I have a rather hard time imagining my mother saying, “Oh, just open my e-mail and do a search for the dates September through December 1967 and then read our notes!”)

Tactile, three-dimensional objects--especially letters, as manifestations of our ideas and personality and voice, captured in our unique scrawling writing--will, I respectfully submit, always be more ineffably soul-stirring than their pixelated, code-created counterparts.

I want my own kids--whenever I have them, and no matter how digital the world has become by the time they grow up--to understand that, to agree. And to dance through through their own hallways on those frequent occasions when they receive a handwritten letter.

---

Notes:

1. If you send me a letter or postcard, I promise I will (a) do that happy mail-nerd dance when I get it, and (b) write back. My address is over there in the side-bar at right.

2. Many thanks to the various friends who have forwarded me the mail-related stories referenced in this post. Cheers, John Neely, Pam Mandel, Eva Holland, and Jason Albert.

3. N.B.: I make these points better, faster, and with more storytelling and less pontificating in the book.

Not-So-Flattering Photos of Famous Landmarks: Plaza de la Revolución (Havana)

2012-01-16T11:16:00.000-06:00

It's a parking lot.
Not kidding.

Postcard Gallery: Bangladesh, New Zealand, epic four-page letter

2011-12-12T13:19:00.000-06:00

Forgive me, Postcard Gallery--I have neglected you too long. But even though I'm a slacker, my mailbox runneth over. Highlights include a homemade postcard from Bangladesh, a note from an actual postcard archivist (!), and a four-page masterpiece of a letter, written in dip pen and featuring a half-page illustration. It's glorious. Click on the images for higher resolution.

From Renee in Bangladesh (who took the photo on the front):

Yes, this is the first postcard I've received from Bangladesh. Thanks, Renee!

From Eva Holland way up in the Yukon, where it's been snowing since, like, August:

The "historic Minneapolis train bridge" is the Stone Arch Bridge, one of
my favorite spots in the city.

From Debra Gust at the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, which is apparently a real thing and which I must visit at once, at the Lake County Discovery Museum:

From ... I honestly don't know who, other than someone channeling Garrison Keillor while driving through Saint Peter, Minnesota (although the picture is of Denmark):

From Jane in New Zealand (who also sent me that delightful bear-o-gram a while back; the bear has settled in among the travel books on my shelves and seems quite content, although it does occasionally commandeer my computer to look up the latest news about the All-Blacks):

And, finally, the letter. Now, let me introduce this by saying that I get giddy every time I see a piece of paper in my mailbox. Few things (chocolate croissants, for example) make me happier than getting a postcard or a letter, even from people I know (hi, Mom!). But. There is still something particularly wonderful about getting mail from absolute strangers, especially when they've clearly gone above and beyond in the effort. Every now and then, I get a letter that makes me not just smile but do a little jig right here in the post office--or, in this case, basically sprint outside and do a triumphant, sprinting lap around the building.

Brendon Ly is, I hereby decree, the coolest 15-year-old in Ottawa. He's the one who sent me the postcard from there a few weeks ago, the one beginning, "Hello, Stranger." When I opened his latest letter, this was the first thing I saw:

Crappy picture on my part, but you get the idea.

An authentic, mint-condition vintage air-mail envelope. Unused. Just ... for me to add to my collection (or, you know, send to someone). And then there was this:

A four-page letter. In old-style script writing. (Note at the top of the first page: "Pre-script: Usually I print.") Needless to say, no e-mail could possibly convey the same sense of personality and, well, charm as this letter, and even a high-resolution scan can't capture its nuances and details. Like the ink. As he notes on page three, "By the way, if you run a finger over the words, they will have a raised texture to them. I think this Chinese ink has shellac in it ... The thickness added by the shellac also helps it cling to dip pens, but will apparently clog up a fountain pen." Sure enough: it's raised. (NB: I had no idea fountain pens and dip pens were not the same thing. When I read that, I wanted to click over to Google to do some quick research--ignoring the rest of the letter for a sec, as I would have if it were an e-mail, only to return to it half an hour later after getting hopelessly distracted--but, this being a letter, I couldn't just move my mouse a few inches and click away. I couldn't be distracted. Score one more point for letters: they're more immersive.)

That blue pen you see above is a calligraphy pen, just to show off the differences in texture and stroke and style.

Finally, on the last page, the show-stopper. A hand-drawn illustration perfectly sized to make into a postcard. Included in the envelope was a piece of card stock with a the back already formatted.

"You know the rest," he says. "Send it to whomever you want to."

In other words, continue the cycle. Keep it going. Keep writing. Keep sharing. Not in the easy, mindless digital form--"sharing is caring," says all the 18-point Arial above a row of icons for FaceTwitPlusWhateverElseWasInventedYesterday. But in the more tangible, more physical, more personal sense. More texture, quite literally.

What a joy to get this letter--any letter, any postcard, of course, but especially this one.

And, yes, I will send the postcard on to someone else. Part of me wants to keep it for myself and not take scissors to paper. But that would defeat the entire point. A tear will trickle down my cheek as I release it into the mailbox, just like in those Disney films, the ones with the whales or the lions or the what-have-yous, and the benevolent caretakers who know the animals must be returned to the wild. Go free, young postcard! Venture forth! Godspeed! Find your place in the world!

Keep writing.

So. Thanks, correspondents! Much appreciated. My own stamp-affixed messages are already en route in some cases; the rest will be on the way in the next day or two--although, Brendon, it might take me a bit longer to come up with something to match your awesomeness.

The Authoritative Guide to Being an Expert Tourist (vol. 1)

2011-11-14T10:55:00.001-06:00

Congratulations on advancing this far, young tourist. You've done well.

You have mastered the Security Line Rumba, that dance of slipping off your shoes and emptying your pockets while pirouetting to avoid the trio of hungover conventioneers whacking you with their carry-ons as they try to dig out their laptops.

Your internal Irish Pub radar is so well-honed that you can smell the Guinness and County Cork tchotchkes from three miles away.

You have perfected the Goofy Tourist Picture Pose, every bit as ridiculous and labored as a supermodel's pout-strut, but accessorized so much more creatively, with the Eiffel Tower as a hat or Manneken Pis pee(r)ing over your shoulder or Mary Tyler Moore as your bronzed arm-candy (see fig. 1). (See further reading section below.)

Fig. 1

But those were just the basics. You have proven your interest and commitment. Now you must prove yourself. It is time to move on to the Advanced Touristing Techniques. And I, your Touristing Guru Master Expert Dude, am here to help. Master just a few more skills, young camera-toting, globe-trotting, guidebook-waving grasshopper, and you, too, will be able to call yourself a true Advanced Expert Tourist.

This will be an ongoing set of lessons--the wisdom of the ancients cannot be explained in a single blog post, nor can true proficiency be attained if your focus is not pure and constant. I ask--nay, implore--you to begin practicing forthwith and to dedicate yourself to the cause with singular vigor. More lessons will follow shortly.

TODAY'S LESSON:

Get out of the way or join the dance: Two methods of interacting with other camera-toting tourists.

Method 1: The camera-duck/tourist-pivot
The scenario: You're walking through a busy tourist area and you spot someone seemingly staring--hard--into space, a big, cheesy grin affixed to his or her face.

Rookie mistake: After staring hard at the person, trying to determine what that demented Jack Nicholson-in-The Shining grin is all about (and whether or not you should be sprinting away), you realize that said person is posing for a picture. You stop abruptly so as not to walk into the frame, but your halting, flustered demeanor makes the poser and the photographer both become self-conscious, and the poser starts to apologize just as the camera shutter clicks, necessitating a do-over or ten. The spontaneity is lost, the moment ruined, and it's all your fault.

Advanced technique: After much time on the tourist trail and much practice spotting the assorted and multitudinous but not-very-elusive breeds of photo-posers, you will hone your vision and instinct and be able to spot them from a minimum of twenty strides away. Pretend you don't see them but stay out of the frame. Don't break stride, don't make eye contact, just duck or pivot around them.

Recommended practice: Ducking and/or pivoting without breaking stride. I suggest at least five reps of ten pivots and fifteen walking-ducks per day.

Method 2: The Tourist Dance
The scenario: Same as above, but suddenly you're in a social mood and want to interact.

Rookie mistake: You stand around awkwardly, waiting for the photographer or the poser to see you, hoping they'll ask you to take a picture. Uneasy glances are exchanged until the photographer gets so weirded out by your silent, leering presence that he/she chucks the camera hard in your face before they both make a run for it. Laugh not, young tourist. This could be you--according to research by the esteemed Tourists Are People Too Institute, two out of every five tourists require facial stitches from this precise scenario. And two more of those five will require hospitalization after taking the opposite approach and getting in the photographer's face and yelling, in a condescending, you-don't-speak-English-do-you voice, "WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TAKE A PHOTO OF BOTH OF YOU, 'CAUSE I TOTALLY COULD" and then refusing accept a polite "No, thanks" as an answer, and persisting ... and, eventually, getting a swift, solid punt in the crotch. Take it from this squeaky-voiced expert: you do NOT want this to happen.

Advanced technique: Lead by example. Incidentally, this also works if there's just one person around and isn't even looking at you--it just so happens to be a perfect ice-breaker for meeting people (like, say, that alluring stranger over there--TAPTI studies also show that being an Advanced Tourist makes you at least seventy-nine percent more attractive and intriguing). Walk up confidently but politely, holding your own camera slightly in front of you with one hand and subtly gesturing toward yourself and giving a friendly smile. If you are unsure what language the other person speaks--or want to maintain an air of mystery about your own nationality--point to your camera and then to yourself and say, "Photo?" Chances are, by this time, the other person is doing the same thing--holding out a camera, trying to guess your language, "Excusi, mein foto, tak, domo arigato ... okay?" For the full dancing and ice-breaking effect, make sure you show the other person your handiwork on the screen, and double-check his or her photo of you as well.

Important note: You want the overall message to be charming, but persuasive, the general sentiment being, "I'd sure appreciate if you would take my picture, and then I'll take yours, and then we'll strike up conversation in whatever common language we share--or, failing that, endearingly awkward hand gestures--& then you'll invite me to go stay with you in your villa." TAPTI research has shown that, indeed, you can convey that precise message, down to the incongruous ampersand, entirely with the subtle way you point and gesture with your camera. Be aware, however, holding your camera at a slightly improper angle can be misinterpreted and may, again, lead to misunderstandings and severe bodily harm. Especially in certain parts of Switzerland. (Oh, the stories I could tell from that innocent time before I learned the Tourist Wisdom!)

Recommended practice: Work on those hand gestures and the precise questioning intonation of your query. Since not everyone speaks English, even on the tourist trail, be sure to have a backup language, too--practice saying both "Photo?" and "¿Foto?"

Additional notes
After years of diligent study and meticulous attention to the art and craft of touristing, you will be ready to apply your skills in the field. For complete Touristic Fulfillment, however, you will need to make a pilgrimage to specific sites where other Advanced Tourists gather--it is in these settings that you will truly understand what it means to be a Tourist and will finally be able to practice such sacred collective rites as Synchronized Touristing (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Upcoming lessons:

Achieving just the right reluctant, self-aware eye-roll when you refer to yourself as a tourist.
What to do when you hear the telltale sound of a Peruvian pan-flute.
The utter importance of wearing black socks.
Tourist origami: How to re-fold a map so that the currently-relevant area is all that shows and you're not holding an immense flag of a sheet of paper and basically asking people to relieve you of your wallet and various easily-sellable internal organs.

Further reading:
For additional insights on the matter of the art and science of the Goofy Tourist Picture Pose, please refer to the world's foremost authority on the matter, a digital volume entitled Tacky Tourist Photos (Garnick et al., 2009-present).

The best postcards are the ones that begin, "Hello, Stranger"

2011-10-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

This? This is fantastic. Utterly charming. It hit my mailbox not long ago, from a teenage correspondent in Canada.

(Name and address redacted.)

Update: Here's the front:

Postcard Gallery: Bear-o-gram, clog-o-gram, and snail-mailed e-mail

2011-10-17T17:21:00.000-05:00

The handwritten letter revolution continues! Can't stop, won't stop, etc. Take a look at some of the mail that's showed up in my mailbox in the last few weeks. Actually, before you do that, know this: my mailbox is currently empty, but I have ten--count 'em, ten--postcards just itching to be sent in response to ... someone. So write to me and I promise I'll write back!

And now, the Gallery-O-Handwritten (well, mostly handwritten) Awesomeness:

Clockwise from top left (with selected ones singled out below):

"Snail Mail My Email" letter (a concept I discussed earlier) from Susan and Tom
Door County (Wisconsin) postcard from Shirley
Bear-o-gram--a very cool paper bear sculpture that came in an envelope with assembly instructions--from Jane in New Zealand
Iceberg Lake (Glacier National Park) postcard from my father
Clog postcard (!) from Jean
Fenway Park (Boston) postcard from Mike
Minneapolis postcard from Sebastian
Postcard with a lovely drawing of a restaurant by Jane in New Zealand
Lefse postcard (by Minneapolis's favorite illustrator, Adam Turman) from, uh, Garrison Keillor (see below)
San Diego postcard from Susan and Tom

Okay, now a few close-ups, with notes. First of all, that bear-o-gram. That's one adorable and sharp-looking, bear, no? And it looks no worse for the wear despite the long journey from New Zealand:

Then there's this, from my friend Sebastian, who works at the intersection of technology and travel:

Does the use of a handwriting font make this better or worse? Discuss.

And that sweet lefse postcard is, as mentioned, signed by Garrison Keillor ... whose handwriting looks suspiciously similar to that of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison:

It says: "Doug--Love the blog! As you are aware, I'm looking
for someone to take over for me as host of A Prairie Home Companion.
Interested? You'll have to work on your stereotypes of Minnesotans.
Best, Garrison Keillor."

Susan and Tom, who live on a boat, sent this to me after I posted about the "Snail Mail My Email" program a while back. (Basically, you email your note to someone else, who then does the writing and mailing for you.) I was ambivalent ... okay, no, I kind of thought it was absurd, offering the appearance of a handwritten note without the effort. But Susan and Tom make a valid point: not everyone has easy access to a post office or otherwise finds it hard to send mail the old-fashioned way (like, say, if you live on a boat).

And finally, baseball fans NOT from Boston will enjoy this postcard from Mike, sent about a week before the regular season ended (with the Red Sox, indeed, pulling an epic collapse):

So. Who's next?

Nicollet Island: my secret garden

2011-09-26T20:36:00.000-05:00

This summer, I've been working as a Segway tour guide on the Minneapolis riverfront.

That's right. I'll pause while you stop laughing--Segways are inherently humorous; no way around that.*

Okay, giggling over? Thanks. Moving on. It's been most interesting to see the other side of the tourist experience--to be the guide showing people around my city, to be the spectacle in the tourists' viewfinders. (I figure that on every single tour, I'm in at least 100 photos.)

More on that some other time. But one of the best things about doing the tours is that they give me a chance to show off one of my favorite places on the planet, Nicollet Island. What makes it so great? I'm so glad you asked. Here, go read this Onion AV Club article I wrote about it!

* To answer the frequently asked questions:
1. No, the inventor did not die in a Segway accident. But the owner of the company did.
2. No, it's not that hard to ride, in spite of the mishaps you saw on Arrested Development or the Ellen show or when George W. Bush tried to do it.
3. About $7,000.

Two-hour tourist: Chicago

2011-09-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

I won't pretend that you can get any sense of a place in two hours, but sometimes that's all you've got. You're taking a road trip and have to keep moving, or you have an extended layover with just enough time to dash from the airport to the city to see one or two things.

The question is, what do you see? What one or two things are readily accessible and can be experienced in a short period of time (that is, no huge historic sites or ten-course tasting menus or all-day tours) but still offer something unique to that particular place?

Last weekend, I was in the Chicago area for my girlfriend's brother's wedding (congrats, Peter and Katie!). The day after the wedding, my girlfriend, Maren, and I took the train into the Chicago Loop and had about two hours to be tourists. There wasn't time to explore the neighborhoods. There wasn't time for a Cubs game.

For me, one of the must-sees in any city is the landmark park. They make for great people-watching, and there's something about the dichotomy of nature and surrounding urbanity that I find impossibly alluring. Central Park in New York, Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, Retiro in Madrid, and so on. (Come to think of it, one of my favorite things to do in any given city is to find a pastry shop and eat my gluteny goodness in that landmark park--and I've done so in each of the above parks.)

In Chicago, the lakefront area has two adjacent parks, Millenium Park and Grant Park, which are always crowded, even on a brisk, rainy fall afternoon. We opted for Millenium, because I wanted to see the famous Cloud Gate sculpture, popularly called the Bean because, indeed, it looks like an enormous, metallic bean, fit for consumption by some Brobdingnagian robot hiding behind the Hancock Building (Jerry Bruckheimer, you're welcome to that visual for your next movie--no charge). The last few times I've been to Chicago, the Bean or the park have been closed for various reasons, and I was starting to take it personally. But this time, there it was, open, uncovered, and just begging us to pose in front of it for roughly 2,531 photos.

If I can't think of any new topics for blog posts, I'm just gonna start
posting the other 2,530 photos one at a time.

Next stop: the Chicago Cultural Center, at the suggestion of my friend Charlie. Formerly a library, the building is now, well, a cultural center, with various exhibits and a cafe, not to mention a whole hell of a lot of really cool interior details--like, for example, the world's largest Tiffany art-glass dome. For starters. And glass mosaics like you'd expect in some sort of Nero-worthy Roman villa. Except it's all free and open to the public, and conveniently located just across Michigan Avenue from Millenium Park. As Maren and I wandered around, we could hear what sounded like some sort of Enya-esque calliope music reverberating throughout the building. Eventually, we tracked down the source: a public concert, in one of those mosaic-covered rooms, of a Javanese gamelan group. There were some twenty or thirty musicians in all, some playing xylophone-like instruments, some chanting, some hitting gongs. (And, it must be said, they were all conspicuously, emphatically white--it was as though some Chicago book club read Eat, Pray, Love, then all went to Bali to soak up some Eastern Spiritual Wisdom Stuff and, having achieved enlightenment, came back to Chicago to resume life as investment bankers who got together on weekends for gamelan jam sessions, just to relive those heady, magical days in Bali. Just guessing.)

As Javanese gamelan groups go, they were the best I've ever heard. Also the only ones. We headed out after one song. Back to the train station--by way of a bakery, of course.

And, honestly, I think that was a perfect two-hour tourist itinerary--two big, unique landmarks, some good people-watching, some cultural education. Plus a doughnut.

So now I'm trying to think of what I'd recommend for a two-hour tourist in other cities I know well.

Minneapolis: Downtown riverfront. Walk along the Saint Anthony Falls History Trail, through Mill Ruins Park and across the Stone Arch Bridge. Read the various historic markers that explain how the city grew up right here, around Saint Anthony Falls. Get some coffee or a tea-infused cocktail on the patio at the Aster Cafe or some gelato at Wilde Roast. Go out on the endless bridge at the Guthrie Theatre.

(UPDATE) Or ... Eat Street and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Eat Street is a roughly mile-long section of Nicollet Avenue lined with restaurants of every variety; the main stretch is centered at 26th Avenue and extends a couple of blocks up and down Nicollet. It's an eclectic mix of eats, a veritable United Nations: Caribbean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, German, Chinese, Mexican ... you name it. And there's a pretty wide price range in terms of price range and ambiance--if you want Vietnamese food, for example, you can choose between the hole-in-the-wall Jasmine Deli or the swankily modern, bistro-y Jasmine 26 (which has has bubble tea cocktails, and they're every bit as fantastic they sound). So grab a bite to eat. And then walk three blocks to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I know your time is waning, especially if you lingered over your food, but the MIA is free, so don't feel too bad about spending a limited amount of time there. The museum covers a full range of important art eras--not so different from any other big-city museum, to be honest, but it's still an impressive collection--but make a beeline for section dedicated to Prairie School design (I think it's on the fourth floor) for proof positive that the sense of place here in the Midwest is every bit as inspiring as mountains or the sea.

Seattle: Pike Place Market. See the flying fish. Touristy as hell, it's true, but get over it. I, for one, will never get tired of watching those fishmongers toss massive salmons to each other like fish Frisbees, never dropping them, joking all the while. You'd probably have some extra time, though, and the surrounding areas of downtown Seattle aren't that interesting, although you could go walk around by the waterfront, even if it is rather covered up with piers and such in that part of town.

Okay. Question for the masses. I have two hours in your hometown. Maaaybe three. Where should I go?

That other writer and his other outdated guidebook

2011-09-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

So. This.

A new book has come to my attention. It's a humorous memoir by a writer who traveled around a continent using only "the guide that started it all." Hilarity ensues. Lessons are learned. History is explored. So much has changed. So little has changed. And so on. Stop me if this sounds familiar.

Nope, that's not my book. That's some OTHER guy who did the same thing I did, but touring Southeast Asia with a 1975 copy of Lonely Planet. His name is Brian Thacker and his book came out, uh, two weeks ago. It's called Tell Them to Get Lost: Travels with the Lonely Planet Guide that Started it All. From the book synopsis on Thacker's web site:

When Tony Wheeler wrote Lonely Planet's first-ever shoestring guidebook, South-East Asia offered 'cheap and interesting travel without the constantly oppressing misery of some of the less fortunate parts of Asia'. Certain 'hotspots' in the region attracted the tourist crowds, but there were many 'untouched places' too.

So have Tony's recommendations stood the test of time? Just how much has South-East Asia changed since the Wheelers ambled through the region in flared pants? Brian Thacker decides to retrace Tony and Maureen's footsteps through Portuguese Timor, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and Burma using the original 1975 South east Asia on a Shoestring as his only guidebook.

Part of me wants to read this right now, because it sounds hilarious and insightful, etc. The other part of me ... the other part of me wants to go test the structural integrity of his wall by giving it some massive smacks with his cranium. But I presume there's plenty of room in this nascent genre for both of us.

To be clear, I'm more amused by this coincidence than annoyed. It was inevitable that someone else would also have the--if I may say so--great/bad idea to travel in this willfully-misguided way. Brian Thacker, I hope we meet someday and have the chance to swap outdated-guidebook stories. And when we do, you're buying the beers.

Postcard Gallery - late summer edition

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

The handwritten letter revolution continues! Thanks to all of the amazing correspondents who have sent letters, cards, postcards, and aerograms. This batch features letters from Costa Rica, The Netherlands, American Samoa, and that impossibly exotic land known as the Minnesota State Fair.

Taking things left to right, in rows, from the top:

Top row: Corny (ha ha) Nebraska postcard from Maren; abstract art/postcard from my toddler nephews and niece.
Second row: letter in a sweeet map envelope, also from Maren; sockeye salmon postcard from my nephews and niece in Seattle.
Third row: retro postcard from the Minnesota State Fair, from my parents; meta-and-incredibly-cool Postcardly postcard of postcards, from Pam Mandel.
Fourth row: London postcard from my sister and brother-in-law while they were losing at a pub quiz in London; card from Gee in The Netherlands; promotional postcard for The Current.
Bottom row: Orkney postcard from my parents, who are obsessed with Orkney and go there roughly every three weeks (or at least once a year); aerogram (from my template!) from Erin in American Samoa, where you can apparently mail a letter to the mainland USA for just a single first-class postage stamp, which is a pretty neat trick if you think about it; and, finally, a fine-looking lizard posing for the cameras in Costa Rica, courtesy of Susan and Tom, who live on a boat there.

Keep 'em coming, please! My address is right over there in the sidebar to the right >>. And if I owe you my own letter/postcard, it'll go in the mail today. No, seriously--they're all written and ready to send.

Six travel videos to inspire wanderlust

2011-09-06T08:08:00.005-05:00

I know, I know. You don't come here for lists. You don't come here for videos. You can get that stuff at roughly 10,312 other blogs. All true. Nonetheless, here we are.

Of late, I've been getting itchy feet and trying to think of my next adventure, which has led to some random Googling and travel-blog-reading, plus too much time spent on YouTube and Vimeo looking at videos and feeling all inspired ... and then clicking over to the next video rather than, you know, planning a trip. So here are some of the greatest hits of the many videos out there that will pique your wanderlust.

First up: "Where the Hell is Matt?" It's an obvious choice, and everyone reading this is probably among the 38 million (!!) people who have watched it already, but this viral video of Dancing Matt doing his thing all over the world still makes me smile. Mesmerizing.

In a somewhat similar vein are these newer videos posed about a month ago. There are three: Eat, Learn, Move. Instead of following a dorky dancer around the world, though, these ones show a guy participating in each of the titular verbs around the world. Quirky, delightful, subtly thrilling--like eye candy for the traveler.

Granted, most of the above videos would be hard for the rest of us to replicate. I, for one, don't have the means to fly all over the world (forty-four countries for dancing Matt Harding, eleven for the eating, moving, learning guy) and put together epic montage videos. So in the more realistic "I could maybe do that" realm, here are a couple of others. Ironically, these more accessible-seeming adventures are, unlike the more epic ones above, entirely fictitious. They're ads for a language-learning program, so I suppose the very intent of these videos is supposed to be to make us feel like we could live out these stories--they're travel fairy tales, but still relatable.

There are also similar videos for Beijing and London.

And finally, on a more humorous front, here's my pal Darren Garnick discussing his blog Tacky Tourist Photos and showing off some of the best submissions.

Anyone have any to add? What videos make you want to hit the road?

Real mail via email: a round-up of services and apps and such

2011-08-11T21:13:00.000-05:00

The letters and postcards and aerograms keep rolling in--thanks, Awesome People. I'll update the gallery soon.

I've also recently become aware of some interesting modern, digitally-assisted takes on the handwritten postcard, efforts that combine the wonders of the internet with actual physical pieces of mail in innovative and intriguing ways.

First up, as mentioned by a commenter on a recent post, Postcrossing is "a postcard exchange project that invites everyone to send and receive postcards from random places in the world. For free!" In this case, you--you personally--are writing and receiving Real Mail. According to the site, in six years of the project, participants have sent more than eight million postcards. I think that bears repeating and an impressed nod and raise of the eyebrows, yes? Eight. Million. Postcards. Cheers to that.

Then, via GalleyCat, there's Snail Mail My Email:

Type a message to a friend, family member, pet, politician, or lover, and email it to snailmailmyemail@gmail.com. Then sit back and relax while your email is handwritten, sent out, and delivered to the recipient of your choosing, completely free of charge!

It's only available through August 15th. So, you know, act now.

A quibble, though. So. Obviously, I support every effort to bring back handwritten letters (and some of the letters in their gallery are really quite charming). But ... come on. This seems like a ... well, kind of lazy and indirect way of doing it. Yes, yes, I get it: the whole outsourcing thing is the point of the project, and I should think of it as artistic expression and an exercise in a new form of crowd-sourcing, not as a way to bring back Real Mail. But still: really?! It's sort of like if you took a pot of chicken noodle soup over to a sick friend ... but had someone else make the soup (from your family recipe, though!), and also had a courier deliver it. The end product says, "Thinking of you." The process says, "But not really."

One of my mom's postcards to my dad in 1967.

Sorta kinda similarly, there are a couple of sites/apps that will send a postcard to someone using a photo and text that you upload. That is, you upload your photo and you write some text, and then the company makes it into a postcard and sends it off. There may be tons of sites/apps for this, but the two I know of are Postcardly and goPostal. For some reason, I actually find this more charming than cheating. Snail Mail My Email, because it's longer text, and it's being handwritten by someone else just feels so sneaky to me--again, there's the general appearance of thoughtfulness without the actual effort. But the postcards don't pretend to be something else, and they take your photo and make it into the front of a postcard, which otherwise involves takes some serious doing. It's a shortcut, sure, but it's not trying to be anything else.

Postcard-writing and the New York Review of Books

2011-08-02T16:45:00.002-05:00

My friend Arijit alerted me to a lovely post from the New York Review of Books blog, titled "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing." Key quote:

Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. If there was such a book, I’m sure it would contain hundreds of anonymous masterpieces of this minimalist art, since unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes.

There's something about the last paragraph, though, that I find a bit off-putting:

So, dear reader, if you happen, on your daily rounds, to come across in a coffee shop or a restaurant some poor soul sitting alone over a postcard and visibly struggling with what to write, take pity on him or her. They are the last of a species, and are almost certainly middle aged or elderly, already nervous and worried about all the problems older people face in this country.

That generalization that people who write postcards are, in some nebulous-but-important sense Older--well, it's probably correct. Almost certainly. And yet there's also something so reductive about that artfully-drawn scene and its insistence on corralling the postcard-writers into some dusty museum display of a bygone era, as though to write a postcard is to put down one's shuffleboard stick and scribble some comments about how Truman sure was a good president, gee whiz, before pushing the walker down the hall to the activity room for the 2pm ragtime sing-along.

Come on. Don't consign the very act of postcard-writing to the nursing home for lost-cause, nearly-dead communication, along with Morse code and the Pony Express. Don't take pity on postcard writers. To ask for pity, to claim that this is the domain of only the "problem"-ridden "older people"--this isn't going to do much to make anyone else want to write postcards, either. Lament the decline, sure, but spare me the eulogies.

We may be a dwindling--note that I did not say "dying"--species at the moment, but if my own mailbox is any indication, us postcard-writers still have plenty of life, plenty of stories.

Home, heartbreak, and the Minneapolis 35W bridge collapse

2011-08-01T12:51:00.002-05:00

Preface
Sometimes the greatest thrill of travel is how it puts your home into fresh perspective, how you return to a familiar yet newly, oddly foreign place. I could never be one of those travel writers without a fixed address, without a specific place called home. For me, for now, home is Minneapolis--it's where I feel grounded, it's my own internal True North.

If there's one specific location here in Mill City that tugs at my soul in some deeper way and has that resonance of this-is-who-I-am-this-is-where-I-belong, it's the Mississippi riverfront. It didn't always have that effect--for the longest time, I thought of the Mississippi as not much more than a glorified cesspool. But then, four years and two months ago, I moved to an apartment four blocks away.

And then, two months later--four years ago today--something happened on the river. The Interstate 35W bridge collapsed into the water. Thirteen people died.

I didn't see the collapse take place, but I saw its aftermath. It's seared into my mind. This is what I wrote about it that night:

--

The Bridge . . .

I cross the Mississippi twice each day as I commute to and from work, and Old Man River lost his mystique for me long ago. For me, and most people in Minneapolis, the water is far more likely to spawn winces from the reek of chemicals than awe over its legend. Mostly, though, we don't even think about it at all — it's just there, a passive obstacle pretty much devoid of meaning. We have a lot of bridges over the Mississippi, and crossing them is typically no more spirit-moving than driving on any other street, especially in this summer of drought, when the waters are muddy and lethargic.

But now we have one less bridge, and no one here in River City can think about much else today.

I’m safe. My friends, co-workers, and relatives are safe, as far as I know. But I’ve already heard too many stories of close calls, and once my mind starts, inevitably, to wander down the path of “what if,” it’s impossible to stop. What if I’d had the day off, as I was supposed to before a big project came up? My father wouldn’t have given me a ride home, so during rush hour, he would have taken his usual route and passed directly under the . . .

But so far, I’ve always let that ellipsis take over at the last minute — completing those thoughts is pointless and terrifying.

When I got home today, I was feeling so beat and lethargic on this hot day that I cranked up the AC and collapsed in bed. When I woke up from my nap and went online for a second and checked the local news, I saw the headline: BREAKING NEWS . . .

The bridge had been down for about forty minutes. I went outside and saw a flock of helicopters hovering over the river. A plume of smoke in the distance. An chorus of sirens filled the air, relentless and haunting. I walked over to the Stone Arch Bridge, the next bridge upstream from 35W, along with thousands of other pedestrians. We were all thinking and muttering and sharing those same trailing-off observations: It could have been me, it could have been my friend, it could have been my brother, it could have been, it could have been, it could have been . . .

What struck me, though, was that no one seemed to realized that for other people, it was. They were there, wrong place, wrong time. And now some of them are dead. The mood on the Stone Arch Bridge was somber, but not distraught or anguished — there were many vacant eyes, but none welling with tears. From our vantage point, we could see twisted metal and accordioned concrete, but no cars or people — we understood the collapse, but not the reality of the human toll.

The view from the Stone Arch Bridge. Look in the middle of the two arches on the right side of the bridge in the background. See the area that looks like a collapsed, twisted roadway? That's what it is.

Another view from the Stone Arch Bridge: Emergency vehicle from across the metro area were line up at Mill Ruins Park, just upstream from the bridge. In spite of the inherent chaos of the situation, the emergency response was incredibly well-coordinated.

Everyone was taking photos with their cell phones, though phone service was pretty much out. (This, actually, had been my first clue that something terrible had happened — in our modern age, a phone screen that has ample reception bars but an ominous “network busy” screen is a sign that something is seriously amiss.) Those who could get through were blabbing away to their friends: "Yeah, I'm on the Stone Arch Bridge, but if I hadn't missed my exit, I might have been . . ."

I made my way to the University Avenue overpass above the freeway, the closest vantage point to the collapsed bridge. Here, there was a different mood. You could see the cars, the trucks . . . and the school bus, leaning against the side of the bridge on a section that was angled toward the river. I later learned that everyone got out safely, but at that moment, none of us knew; we could only speculate and hope. We were closer to the scene than anyone watching on TV at home, and yet we were less aware of what had happened or what was happening. Rumors and hypotheses flowed through the crowd, but facts were elusive; all we could do was exchange helpless glances and wonder if . . .

The view from the University Avenue overpass.

As I headed home, hoping to beat the thunderstorm that was rolling in, I saw more emergency vehicles than should ever be in one place. The parking lot outside one apartment building had been turned into a staging ground for a long line of ambulances from seemingly every hospital in the Twin Cities. Search-and-rescue boats fought their way through traffic, trying to get to the riverfront. And everywhere,everywhere, fire trucks. From Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Vadnais Heights, Inver Grove Heights, Maplewood, all over. Police from Roseville were directing traffic. In spite of the chaos, it was all astonishingly orderly — all of the emergency workers seemed to know exactly what they were doing; it was a model of teamwork and efficiency.

It’s so tempting to talk about how the waterway that was the lifeblood of Minneapolis is now a scar, or how the dark clouds that filled the sky after the collapse were some signal from on high of mourning or of looming apocalypse. But for me, metaphor loses some of its impact when you see something so jarring, so unexpected, so awful — the hard reality of mangled concrete and burning cars and a yellow school bus seeming to dangle on the precipice makes life seem too stark, too real. I don’t need clouds to tell me the gravity of the situation.

Because for some people, this wasn’t just “That was almost me, if only . . .”

----

Postscript:
The silver lining was the community's instant response. People who were passing by on bikes, on foot, in cars, in boats all rushed in immediately to help. No one ran away; everyone ran in.

The Minnesota Twins--who at the time played in the Metrodome, half a mile away from the bridge--had a game an hour after the bridge collapse, and decided not to cancel because it would mean sending 25,000 people back out onto the streets, impeding the rescue effort. So they made an announcement and said here's what's happened, but we're asking you to stay here while we play the game. The headline in the Minneapolis Star Tribune the next day read, "Twins Help By Playing."

For my part, my neighbor and I agreed that we had to do something, but didn't know what and didn't want to get in the way. So we got cases of water and Gatorade and passed the bottles out to rescue workers and the traffic control officers and the random people who were doing the real work on this hot day. It felt like the least we could do--make sure they had something to drink and a thank-you for all they were doing, before we disappeared back into the night, letting them do their jobs. And we went home and tried to sleep.

Tried.

Didn't.

----

More coverage:
For the complete story, here's the Star Tribune's multimedia package on the collapse from a couple of years later. Note: If you're from the Twin Cities and/or this is at all painful for you, you should immediately click "skip intro" when you follow that link. A video of the actual collapse starts playing right away, and it's more than a bit of a trigger of memories and anguish. I say that not to sound dramatic but because when I opened the link just now, that anguish really did come back in an unexpected rush as I impulsively, and very suddenly found myself yelling and then bawling.

Postcard gallery: Croatia, sand castles, New Zealand, Edgar Allan Poe

2011-07-27T15:16:00.001-05:00

All kinds of pen-and-paper awesomeness have been showing up in my mailbox of late. In fact, I now get more letters and postcards than I do blog comments—which is absolutely wonderful. Old-school handwritten correspondence for the win. And it bears repeating: these letters and postcards convey a specific sense of personality and sense of place and general warmth that e-mails and tweets and text messages never can.

A partial sampling from the last couple of weeks:

Clockwise from upper left:

Edgar Allan Poe looking handsome-but-sad, from Lee (see below for his note on the back).
Aerogram (!) from Mike Barish.
Plitvička Jezera, Croatia from Shirley.
Handmade map aerogram (!!) from Susie in New Zealand (close-up below).
How To Build a Sandcastle group postcard from my parents, uncle, and cousins, writing from the Jersey shore (the cool, classy kind, not the MTV kind).*
Rannoch Moor, Scotland postcard from … I don’t know who. Given the location of the scene on the front of the card, I’m going to guess it’s from my friend DS in Glasgow (if so: cheers, mate!). See below for the hilarious note on the reverse side.
Arches National Park (Utah) postcard from Eva Holland.

* NOTE: Group postcards are a family tradition and often include greetings from waiters, newly-met friends, and random passersby. Each line is in new handwriting, the sentences getting more compressed toward the bottom as everyone squeezes in, correspondence as clown car. It makes for an interesting, telling artifact of a particular moment of time, showing not just where you were but who was with you and who had what to say about that place and that moment.

A few close-ups:

Yes, Lee. We'll be going to the State Fair and watching the Twins play outdoors
--I asked them to move back outside just so that we could do things the old-fashioned
way when you came to visit.

Seriously, this is a sweet envelope--it's made from a map of the Caribbean.

It's good to keep those writing fingers in shape now and then.

Thanks, all, for joining the Campaign of Awesome People Bringing Back the Handwritten Letter (CAPBBHL—totally catchy, right?). If I have your address, my own postcard to you should be arriving shortly.

And if anyone else wants to join the CAPBBHL cause, my address is right over there in the sidebar. à

Write on.

Notes on watching the World Cup in an airport bar

2011-07-18T13:14:00.003-05:00

I am a soccer nerd. As a player, I am merely semi-competent, although I do have precisely one good move--the step-over turn--and will totally burn you with it, at least until you catch up two seconds later. As a fan, I am somewhat less than a European hooligan, but decidedly more enthusiastic than the average American. Our national attitude toward the beautiful game is pretty well summed up by the header at the top of The Onion's sports section, which has links to the site's sub-sections, in this order and with this wording: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, motorsports, women's sports/soccer.

But it's amazing what a little bit of success in a major international competition can do, at least temporarily. Last year, when the American men's team made a minor run in the World Cup in South Africa, the zeitgeist briefly made room for terms like offside trap, back-heel pass, vuvuzela, and What the hell are you doing, Landon Donovan? And in 1999, famously, the Women's World Cup had its fleeting but bright moment in the national spotlight, with Brandi Chastain's screaming celebration, after making the winning penalty kick in the shoot-out against China, becoming an iconic photo, gracing the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated.

Still, few Americans this year seemed to realize that the Women's World Cup was underway. I'll confess that although I read game re-caps, I didn't actually see a single group-stage game aside from a couple of YouTube highlights.

And then came The Goal. Abby Wambach's laser-precise header off a brilliant cross from Megan Rapinoe in the game against Brazil. (Sadly, I can't find any videos of it--they've all been taken down for copyright violations. If you haven't seen it, though, know that it is bona fide gorgeous). Suddenly, the nation awoke. Abby Wambach became a trending topic on Twitter. Lil' Wayne tweeted his congrats, as did, well, seemingly everyone. (My favorite part of this, by the way, was that Rapinoe also got her due. Americans love the goal-scorers--in any sport--but have a tendency to overlook the people who do all the set-up work. It was nice to see an outside midfielder--my old position--get her richly-deserved praise for the phenomenal service.)

There was no way I was going to miss the final, not as a confirmed soccer nut but also, suddenly, not as an American with even a passing interest in sports. Just one problem: I was going to be on an airplane, coming back from my cousin's wedding in Philadelphia (mazel tov, Jason and Emily!). My plane would arrive at MSP midway through the second half. If I planned right, I could find a television and watch the end.

When I left MSP on Friday, I grabbed an airport map so I could plan a route to a bar at the airport. I packed lightly so that I could carry on my bag and sprint of the airplane. And when I landed on Sunday, that's what I did--I ran off the plane and straight to the French Meadow.

Which was packed. I mean, packed. All the seats at the bar counter were taken, as well as all the tables with even a partial view of the restaurant's two small-ish screens. A low fence separated the restaurant from the concourse, where another two dozen or so people stood staring, rapt. I joined them.

Really crappy phone-camera image of the scene.
But you get the idea.

"What's the score?" I asked a Somali man wearing an Airport Staff uniform.

"1-0, USA," he grinned. There were about twenty minutes left in regulation.

With every American run, we all started to cheer; every time a Japanese player got into our penalty area, we held our breath. The crowd was a mix of travelers nervously checking their watches, airport staff, pilots, flight attendants--the whole cross-section of humanity that passes through airports and makes them such compelling microcosms of the modern world. A group of Japanese tourists stood near me, their reactions precisely opposite those of the rest of the crowd. When Japan scored in the 81st minute, they beamed; the rest of us clutched our heads and groaned.

Overtime. Meaning Abby Wambach time. When she headed the ball into the goal, making the score 2-1, a sixty-ish guy seated at the table just inside the restaurant crowed, "She did that head-butt thing! It's over."

Someone explained that there's no sudden-death (or Golden Goal, if you prefer) in soccer. The guy literally scratched his head and slumped back in his chair, confused.

"We need to go," his wife said. "They're boarding our plane."

"Uh-huh," the guy said, not moving, eyes still glued to the screen.

This is what I love about both airports and sporting events: that coming-together of disparate people, momentary kindred spirits with a common cause (get through security or cheer a soccer team), forging unlikely connections and loyalties. Each fleeting moment is packed with stories and meaning; we're all in this together. Briefly. And then we disperse, back to real life.

As I dug for my camera to document the scene better than I could with my phone (see fig. 1 above), I realized that in my haste to get to the game, I had left my laptop on the plane. My laptop. Kind of my life. I sprinted back to the gate, where they had it at the check-in desk. Whew. And then, yes, I sprinted back to the restaurant, where the crowd had only grown.

More people filled in the concourse to watch the game. More comments and questions about how this soccer thing worked--how long was the overtime? What did "offside" mean? But everyone knew what this game was; everyone knew who was playing and what the stakes were and why we'd all stopped to watch.

The ones who knew the game best, who were most on edge, who understood what was going on and started to get excited or dejected before everyone else, because they could see the plays developing--those were the teenagers. The children of Title IX and the general American soccer boom.

(The pilots, too, seemed to know what was going on. Maybe they've spent more time abroad or are just more, you know, enlightened and worldly, as us soccer fans like to consider ourselves.)

By the time the shootout began, there were perhaps fifty people standing in the concourse, exchanging nervous looks and muttered exhortations of "Come on ..." For several long minutes, the bustle of the airport grew hushed. People looked at watches, but no one moved.

When Abby Wambach nailed her shot, we all cheered: USA! USA! This was going down to the wire, but Abby--unknown in the broader consciousness a week ago, but now virtually an American folk hero, whose name spilled from the lips of even the most uninformed-but-newly-enthusiastic Team USA bandwagon jumper--had started our (yes, our, collective) final, least likely but most epic comeback.

And then.

It didn't work out like that.

We groaned and "Ooh"ed and ten seconds after the game was over, we silently dispersed, the airport once again a mere crossroads rather than a gathering ground.

Eight reactions to getting galleys from your publisher

2011-07-15T08:02:00.003-05:00

1. Initial anticipation
The UPS guy delivers a large parcel for you. From Penguin. Admire the packaging. Never before has bubble wrap looked, to your eyes, so much like a Fabergé Egg. (What, you don’t see it?) But now the anticipation is killing you—stop gazing and open the dang thing already.

2. Wild-eyed, kid-on-Christmas-morning glee
Get a knife. Slice carefully, trying very hard, in your shaky-handed giddiness, not to lop off a finger—or, worse, even slightly knick those precious, precious galleys.

3. Cinematic moment of discovery and triumph
Open the bubble wrap and pull out a galley like Indiana Jones unearthing an ancient, possibly-magical relic. Listen for the John Williams soundtrack soaring in the background.

4. Savor
Stare. For a good long time.

5. High-five Mary Tyler Moore.

6. A Toast!
Introduce your new friend Galley to your dear old pal Vintage Frommer’s Guidebook, the book your book is basically all about. Buy them each a drink. Let the conversation flow.

7. Back To Work
Realize you still have to review the galleys and make some last-minute updates and corrections and fix that one really awkward paragraph that has been confounding you for months.

8. Share the Moment
Also realize you should remind people of some important info, because after all that work, you think you've actually maybe done an okay-pretty-good job (especially once that paragraph is fixed) and it would really be pretty sweet if people, you know, actually bought it, read it, enjoyed it.

Pre-order links:

IndieBound (consortium of independent booksellers; it's also the best place to find your local indie store): http://bit.ly/E5WT_Indie
Amazon: http://amzn.to/E5WT_Amazon
Or just give your friendly local bookseller the ISBN: 0399537325.

Also, please keep in touch!

Sign up for the e-newsletter to get updates on book launch events and info. (Two options: you can sign up for semi-regular updates from me or, if you prefer, just a reminder when the book comes out. I promise to keep it short, sweet, and sporadic--no spam.)

And! Andand. To keep in touch the old-fashioned, pen-and-paper way, send me a real letter/postcard/aerogram (template! over! here!). I promise to write back and I just might feature it in my Postcard Gallery. You can write to me at:

Doug Mack
PO Box 1922
Minneapolis, MN 55458-1922

Guidebooks of doom and the new Chinese Grand Tourists

2011-07-13T23:09:00.001-05:00

These links are a bit old, but still of note:

1. Guidebooks to Risky Attractions Stir Up Trouble in Paradise

The Wall Street Journal reports that in Hawaii, too many tourists are doing dangerous-slash-stupid things based on guidebook recommendations. So many, in fact, that the state legislature is considering a law to "hold Hawaii guidebook writers personally liable for deaths or accidents at spots they recommend."

I think it bears repeating: the best guide is some common sense.

2. The Grand Tour: Europe on fifteen hundred yuan a day (from The New Yorker)

There's that old headline trope again: Europe on [monetary amount] a day, the cheap journalism cliche that originated with, of course, Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and now just won't stop. In any case, though, this article offers an interesting insight into the newest generation of Grand Tourists. Many of the points and anecdotes are similar to those in the Economist article from last year about Chinese Grand Tourists, although it's still fertile ground for storytelling.

In the front row of the bus, Li stood facing the group with a microphone in hand, a posture he would retain for most of our waking hours in the days ahead. In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role—translator, raconteur, and field marshal—and Li projected a calm, seasoned air. He often referred to himself in the third person—Guide Li—and he prided himself on efficiency. “Everyone, our watches should be synchronized,” he said. “It is now 7:16 p.m.” He implored us to be five minutes early for every departure. “We flew all the way here,” he said. “Let’s make the most of it.”

As long as the demographics of tourists keep changing--that is, as long as more people from more places and more backgrounds start traveling--the tourist trail will continue to evolve, to have fresh stories, to retain an intrinsic newness and intrigue. Each person, each culture passing through, leaves its own mark.

An Amsterdam pirate speaks

2011-07-11T08:16:00.031-05:00

So back in Amsterdam, on our first night together, Lee and I went to a pirate bar. You can guess whose idea this was--and which of us was somewhat convinced that he was about to inadvertently donate his skeleton to the decor of the place. For the full story, go back and read my post "Scenes from a pirate bar in Amsterdam."

You know who else read it? Pirates. Amsterdam canal pirates. Apparently pirates read blogs. Apparently pirates, like the rest of us, like to search for themselves on the internet. (For that reason, allow me to state: Blackbeard, if you ever decide to start plundering bakeries, I'd be happy to help. Yo, ho, ho and a barrel of pain au chocolat.) Because a couple of days ago, I got a comment on that year-old post. It's disappointingly free of piratese and seafarer lingo--nary an "Aaarrr" or "Matey" or the Dutch equivalent, whatever that may be--but it's still pretty interesting. Quoth the pirate:

As one of the people working in the pirates bar, I have to comment on this, as I see it, funny post. It sounds like you entered pirates at about 10.30 pm, if at that time it was your fourth bar, you just started too early, mostly all parties start after 11 pm. I think you witnessed a pub-crawl comming every night around 10.45 pm, after that, the night starts. Yeah, there are a lot of english people on the pub-crawl, but you should have been there after 12.30, when most dutch people come to town...

Still hope you enjoyed our bar, and maybe see you another time...

Yes, Amsterdam Pirate, if Lee and I are ever in Amsterdam together again, we will definitely have to stop by and say hi. Or "Aaarrr." And, truly, thanks for clearing up the mystery of the sudden influx of Brits. We did ask a random person if it was a pub crawl, and he said no, but perhaps we just happened to ask the one person who happened to have wandered in on his own.

Also, let it be noted that the International Talk Like a Pirate Day web site has an entire page of Dutch translations of pirate vocabulary and expressions. Like:

Buit / scheepsbuit booty, swag

Kielhalen to drag someone along the keel of the ship

Schatkist treasure chest

AND that same page has Dutch pirate songs. Seriously. Amsterdam Pirates Bar employee, if you're listening: mass pirate song sing-alongs would really enhance the spirit of your bar. You know those carousing Brits would love it.

I've got mail

2011-06-26T13:53:00.000-05:00

As noted recently, as part of my campaign to bring back the handwritten letter/postcard/aerogram, I now have an official post office box. Write to me! And I'll write back and/or, if you don't mind, put your postcard here on the blog.

Like these wonderful pieces of correspondence, which were waiting for me when I did my inaugural mail run a few days ago. Thanks to the two mystery correspondents!

First, a postcard (with an Eiffel Tower design on the front) from someone in San Francisco:

And! This letter from none other than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison*:

* Or perhaps--just maybe--an imposter with a sense of humor and access to Oracle letterhead.

Keep 'em coming, please! Postcards, fake CEO notes, silly tourist photos, aerograms (template! over! here!), pastry tips, anything you've got! Long live the handwritten letter.

Doug Mack
PO Box 1922
Minneapolis, MN 55458-1922

Live and in concert! One night only! (Kinda)

2011-06-16T19:35:00.006-05:00

Don't worry--you don't actually have to hear me sing. I've just always wanted to type that headline.

But! If you're in the Twin Cities next week, you can, in fact, see me live and in conversation with Mr. Breakaway, Kirk Horsted. Please join us on Thursday for an informal EuroTravelTalk about, well, European travel and my own experiences with same--in particular, my Not-So-Grand Tour with a 45-year-old guidebook.

When: Thursday, June 23rd, 7-9pm
Where: Ginger Hop in Nordeast Minneapolis
Featuring: Travel! Humor! Pathos! More travel! Etc.! Also: cheap beer.

Kirk's official event description:

Greetings Dreamers & Schemers!
Sweet summer has finally arrived in Minnesota, but that doesn't mean we can't break away for a few hours to ponder more exotic places...

On Thursday, June 23, from 7 – 9p, please join us for an informal Meetup to talk travels, BreakAways, and ???. We’ll have a light agenda, serious $4 beers & $5 wines, and face-to-face fun & chat. (Food menu also available.)

You can RSVP on the event pages at MeetPlanGo or Meetup ... or just show up! I'd love to see you there, answer some questions, and hear your travel stories.

Special Super Awesome Added Bonus: free stuff! I'll be giving out some aerograms and postcards and maybe even a travel book or two.

Send me a letter! The real, old-fashioned, dead-tree kind!

2011-06-08T09:13:00.002-05:00

I believe I'm on the record as something of a social media skeptic and fan of the old-school ink-and-paper correspondence. Well, I thought it might be time to put those ideas into action and put out a call for letters.

So I went down to the post office. Got a box. A lonely box. Forlorn. Empty inside. But not for long, I hope.

Write to me, willya? I promise to write back, if you include a return address. I'll also scan the best postcards and letters and post them here, on this site, as a sort of newfangled celebration-slash-portfolio of an oldfangled form of communication, a dying art.

I'd love to hear your tourism stories and travel tales, and whatever other musings you care to share. Please send letters, postcards, pastry tips, what-have-you, to:

Doug Mack

PO Box 1922

Minneapolis, MN 55458-1922

Blog comments are great (seriously, if you've ever chimed in on the conversation here, or sent me an e-mail, I'm genuinely grateful), but nothing thrills me like a rambling letter or pithy postcard full of doodles and indecipherable handwriting and notes in the margins. My lonely mailbox and I can't wait to hear from you.

And if you write me an aerogram (template right over here!), I'll think up some Ultra-Excellent Bonus Prize for you.

Also, I'm heading to the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) conference tomorrow, where I'll have some aerograms and Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places postcards to give out--like this:

12 total--collect 'em all!

... So if you're going to be at TBEX, find me! I'll even buy a drink for the first person who mentions this post.

Finally, one last way to keep in touch: I've set up an e-mail newsletter, which you can sign up for by clicking the link in the sidebar (under "Keep in touch") or right here. If you sign up, you'll get sporadic (very sporadic) updates on my travels and book launch/tour details as the publication date approaches (Spring 2012!). If you all you really want is a gentle reminder when the book comes out, so that you can rush to the store and buy a hundred copies, there's also a "just remind me about the book next year" option.

Where would you go for one day? One week? One month? Forever?

2011-05-19T21:51:00.011-05:00

"So where would you go back to right now, if you could?"

I hear this nearly every time I'm in a social setting and mention my Not-So-Grand Tour. It's a fair question, always a good conversation-continuer (especially for someone like me who is always eager to compare travel notes). Anthony's comment on my last post reminded me of my problems replying to the query, though--I don't have a single good answer.

I respond, "How long do I have? A night? A week? A month? Forever?"

Because there are some cities where it's just flat-out dull to be a tourist: not a lot of big, flashy sites or official Things To Do. They're just filled with normal people doing normal, everyday things. In a word: boring. Lookin' at you, Brussels.

And yet Brussels also has a discreet weird/surreal streak (visit the Magritte museum and you'll see what I mean) and a disarming sense of unease with itself--a historic city where much of the history has been demolished; a French-speaking city in a Dutch-speaking region of a famously conflicted country--that I find compelling and even enchanting. I can imagine living there--it seems like an interesting place to grow into, a taste one acquires. A place to settle down. Just not to visit for a couple of days.

As it happens, though Brussels is also where I'd go for just one night, because it's home to one of the best bars I've ever visited, Delirium Tremens. Total tourist trap, but there seemed to be plenty of locals there, and even though the place is huge, it's compartmentalized in such a way that it always feels intimate. Best of all, it a genial, conversational atmosphere like I've never seen--the place buzzed with energy but wasn't loud and didn't feel like an obnoxious "scene." I've talked a lot about the tourist trail as the crossroads of the world, and this is a classic example. (Lee, care to chime in about this?)

So here's my list (as of this moment, though it changes often) of Where I'd Go Back To Right Now:

One night: Brussels. With Lee and/or other friends, though I think it's best shared with just a few people. We'd go to Delirium Tremens and then stumble through the Grand Place very late at night, and sit on those cobblestones with the ghosts of that historic space dancing around us. There might also be some waffles and chocolate involved.

Grand Place at night. Pretty sweet, yes?

One week: Berlin. Because it's another confusing, conflicted, historically rich city. Even though we were there for four days, I feel like I didn't see any of it.

One month: Madrid. Part of it is that I really want to master Spanish. I know just barely enough to get by, more or less, but I'd love to master the language. But I also just feel in love with the people, the food, the architecture, the general vibrant but not frenzied spirit of place. It's a culture I'd like to get to know more. At the same time, though, Madrid feels like someone I might date for ages but know, in my heart of hearts, that I would never want to marry--there's an attraction, to be sure, but that underlying mutual sense of ease and understanding and belonging just won't ever come. Madrid would be a great extended fling. So would Rome. Or Paris. All so charming and beautiful and fun and achingly chic. Six months, definitely. An amazing six months, to be sure. Maybe a year. More than that, though? I'm not certain.

To live: Brussels or Amsterdam. I guess there's just something so intoxicatingly romantic about living on a canal, and Amsterdam feels like more of a Real City than Venice. I loved the Jordaan neighborhood, slightly removed from the tourist center, quieter and funkier than the more popular areas (I don't need to go back to Damrak ever, thanks). It may not have the intrinsically attractive aesthetics and world-capital energy of Rome, Paris, and Madrid, but I'm more than okay with that. And Brussels ... well, as above, there's just an ineffable weirdness to the city that I find completely alluring. It seems like an artistic, intelligent, subtly witty and semi-neurotic kind of place. Again, not first-glance beautiful by any means, but subtle charming all the same. As I said, a place to grow into, bit by bit, but--I'm guessing--more than worth the effort. Ultimately, Amsterdam and Brussels both just feel like cities with the right combination of grit and beauty; they're cultured but not pretentious. I felt grounded and at peace in some intangible way.

Plus, Brussels has some great patisseries, which counts for a lot in my book. Beer, bakeries, historic buildings, low-key-but-convivial vibe. Done. I'm happy.

So. Anyone else want to play along? One day, one week, one month, and/or for the rest of your life. Where would you go? (Anywhere, not just in Europe.)

New title, new design, same me

2011-05-14T22:56:00.002-05:00

Some housekeeping. So you might have noticed something. Like this blog's new title and new design. Both now thirty-eight percent lighter and cheerier and lower cholesterol.

(If you're viewing this in Google Reader or some other RSS feed thing, you'll have to click through to see what I'm talking about.)

The new title--Europe on Five Wrong Turns a Day--reflects what I think, maybe, possibly (ask me later) is the final title of the actual book. It's more tangible, more accurate, more funny this way, yes? Yes. Good. I'm glad you agree. Oh, and, yes, I'm aware the that the domain name and the new title are different. Working on it--trying to get it so that all of the old links still work and such, before I transfer to a new domain name.

Content-wise, the blog will stay more or less the same: quips, rants, stories, and general commentary on travel topics, particularly those relating to:

unexpected angles and insights on tourism and the beaten path, because there's usually a hidden story behind the cliche;
guidebooks and travel apps and how we get informed when we plan our journeys; and
the history and evolution of tourism in the last generation.

I may also start posting about other things more often. We'll see. Honestly, until the book comes out next year, posting is probably going to be pretty light. But if you want any posts about anything, by all means, holler (doug@douglasmack.net).

Wow, that's a lot of boring behind-the-scenes stuff. To bring us back on-topic, I leave you with the full version of the photo I used for the new header. It's from something I stumbled across in Paris when I was lost, the Parade for Sex and Beer. At least, I think that's what it was. I don't know. I couldn't figure it out and I rather enjoyed the mystery of the bizarre spectacle, so I didn't ask anyone.

This is why it's so awesome to be lost: you accidentally stumble upon this sort of thing.

Long live the handwritten letter: an aerogram template for you

2011-05-03T10:54:00.002-05:00

1. Aerograms are awesome, if you still remember what they are.
I love aerograms--or aérogrammes, if you want to sound sophisticated-slash-French. Alas, they're dying out. The United States Postal Service doesn't sell them anymore; neither do many other postal services around the world. Every time I type the word aerogram, my computer puts a little wavy red line below it. That's not a real word, dummy, it says. To which I reply, in my best just-turned-30-so-feeling-curmudgeonly voice, Add to dictionary, you ignorant youngster.

2. Maybe I should back up and explain.
In fact, I may already lost a few of you, as I would if I were talking about rotary phones or sextants. What's he talking about? Think of it as the stationery version of Ikea's flat-pack furniture: it looks like a standard sheet of paper, fold here, fold there, and now your letter is its own envelope. Correspondence meets origami--a neat trick, one that adds an extra layer of intimacy and interactivity that you'll never experience with e-mail or text messages. As Evan Rail put in an aerogram-appreciation essay on World Hum a while back:

Unlike an electronic message, writing an aerogram is an incredibly tactile way to communicate. In reading it, not only are you holding something that your correspondent also once held, but you are allowing your eyes to be guided by the curves and lines that person created—where the writer’s hand once dipped and swept, the reader’s eye then follows.

3. They look like this (the top one is semi-unfolded):

My parents wrote a LOT of aerograms to each other during my mom's 1967 Grand Tour.
These are just a tiny fraction of the full stash.

4. Now go make your own.
But! Before we go getting all nostalgic and wistful--or start looking for an iPhone app that generates a holographic aerogram-opening effect whenever you receive a new e-mail message--allow me to intervene and offer you your very own easy-to-use aerogram template, set up to print on a standard (well, for Americans) letter-size sheet of paper. Unfolded, it looks like this:

Click on the image for the full-size PDF version.

Some assembly required, but that's the fun. Basically, you cut off those gray corners and then fold it up; instructions included in the upper right corner of the sheet.

Download the full-size (8.5" x 11"), high-resolution, ready-to-print PDF via Google Docs right over here. For the full effect, print it on a flimsy blue paper.

5. Long live the aerogram! Long live the handwritten letter! Send lots!
Send one to me, even! (Just ask for the address.) If you do, I promise to write back.

A guidebook for the forgotten tourists

2011-04-19T07:59:00.003-05:00

This article from the Times is several months old, but new to me:

For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.

The story also provides an interesting example of guidebook as snapshot of a particular historic and cultural moment--because they are, in a sense, a how-to manual for everyday life, they can provide all kinds of unvarnished insights into the cultural norms of an era ... for better or for worse. In this case, the Times headline gets at the underlying story: "The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All." Read the whole article here.

On a related note, one interesting thing I learned in my book research was that, even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was a strong tradition of middle class African-American tourists traveling to Europe not just to see the sites but because they knew they would encounter less racism, and be able to travel more freely, across the Atlantic. For more on that ... you'll just have to wait a year for the book (and then turn to the Vienna chapter). Or check out Christopher Endy's Cold War Holidays.

Questions, answers, alpacas, graphs ...

2011-04-11T17:01:00.000-05:00

Hello to everyone who got here from my Q&A with travel writer Alexis Grant on her blog. Thanks for stopping by.

And if you haven't read it, well, head over there and see what I said. Topics include how I got my book deal, why I think writing voice is so important, the joys of the beaten path (but of course), the graph that guided my entire writing process, and alpacas riding unicycles. Kind of. Well, they're mentioned, anyway.

Go. Read.

Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places: Berlin edition

2011-04-11T06:40:00.006-05:00

Lee and I took a walking tour of central Berlin, which started near the Brandenburg Gate, on the former East Berlin side. Our meeting point: a Starbucks. Right next door to the Museum Kennedy.

The plaza on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate feels like just another European central square, teeming with tourists and street performers and souvenir-vendors (in this case, a guy dressed as a WWII Russian soldier, selling WWII-related trinkets; you can see him the the second photo below) and random costumed characters of unknown significance. It's a classic example of Berlin's split personality and seeming inability to decide if it wants visitors to focus on the memorials and museums and reminders of the city's tangled, sometimes-terrible history ... or just to overload on the standard tourist schlock.

Some not-so-flattering photos of the Gate and the adjacent plaza:

And here's another interesting photo of Berlin. See the odd line of cobblestones cutting through the parking lot and running into the Marriott?

Or rather, in this small version of the photo, see the orange arrow in the lower left corner? Okay, now see the thing it's pointing to, the thing that looks like it could maybe possibly be a line of cobblestones? Just trust me: that's what it is.

That's the former line of the Berlin Wall.

The European Tourist Trap Finals

2011-04-04T07:45:00.011-05:00

In honor of tonight's NCAA men's basketball championship game, I present to you a different sort of bracket: the European Tourist Trap Finals, featuring head-to-head match-ups between the finest-slash-tawdriest the Old World has to offer. Click for the large version.

Here's a close-up of one of the regions:

Round-by-round recaps:

First round

Over in the Art (Or Something) Region,two major favorites faced off in our very first match-up:Michelangelo's David, always a solid contender, versus press darling Mona Lisa. All that recent attention must have gotten to Mona Lisa'shead, though, because she just couldn't stand up to the valiant warhero, though it was a close match-up. Meanwhile, tabloid starManneken Pis had his way with oft-ridiculed Glockenspiel, making themost of the crude-but-innovative form that got him here in the firstplace.

Hofbrauhaus was the early favorite overin Food & Booze, and it played the part in its first-roundchallenge against Alt-Berliner Biersalon. This one was neverclose—Hofbrauhaus just has a deeper bench and a huge advantage inthe intangibles: the tubas, the lederhosen, even the sports drinks.Casa Botin also lived up to its reputation, stopping stuffy Parisiancomer Le Grand Colbert; this one turned pretty quickly into Death inthe Afternoon, as the Spaniard was unstoppable.

Among the Big Ol' Monuments, manyexpected an impressive run from Checkpoint Charlie, on the strengthof having overcome so much adversity in recent years. The Colosseumhad other plans in mind, however, and showed off its gladiator spiritin the win; it also seemed to be carrying the extra weight of anentire city, as the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain both fell inenormous upsets in earlier rounds. The Italians had less luck in theother regional match-up, however, with Florence's Duomo falling to late French resistanceand the Eiffel Tower's deceptively intricate efforts.

Finally, in the Public Space Region,Vienna's Prater couldn't take advantage of its towering star inthe middle—the rest of the team looked like a bunch of clowns and carnies,to be honest—and fell hard to Montmartre. And in an intriguingcontest between two waterway-based public spaces, Amsterdam's Red LightDistrict made all kinds of questionable decisions, basically rollingright over and submitting to Venice's Grand Canal.

Second Round

The action resumed with a classicDavid-versus-Urinating-Toddler contest. Advantage: the Wee Whizzer, Manneken Pis, although he had continued foul trouble throughout. In a huge upset,Casa Botin beat out Hofbrauhaus, which many had expected to go allthe way. Casa Botin credits its age and experience, as well as itscuchinillos. The monumentshowdown featured two of the biggest names out there, with theColosseum cracking quite a bit as time wore on but barely eking outthe victory over the Eiffel Tower, which too many times squanderedits height advantage by failing to elevate quickly. Montmartrecontinued its strong run, and though its match-up with the GrandCanal featured several highlight-reel shots,the Parisians had the upper hand.

Semi-Finals

Man-oh-MannekenPis!! The “irreverent little chap” just kept surprising us withhis cheeky play and jaw-dropping creativity and ability to doanything and everything—this kid seems to wear all kinds of hats,and wear them well. Casa Botin superfan Ernest Hemingway had to beescorted from the premises mid-way through the competition forreasons unknown. Solid-but-not-flashy Montmartre kept doing well foritself in the other semifinal, showing off its own spunk and standingproud like a quiet but sacred city on a hill. A powerful showing.

Final
Parisian stalwart Montmartre had the best stuff in the end, starting with a solid foundation, a great outlook, and overwhelming crowd support. Manneken Pis ran out of his supply of tricks, but returns a herononetheless. He'll be back, no doubt, although someone really needs to help him fix his dribbling problems.

On that note, thank you all for being a part of this amazing competition, and we'll see you next time on the beaten path!

Fodor: "The Spy Who Loved Travel"

2011-03-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

I know a guidebook writer. He claims the gig isn't quite as glamorous as you'd think. I'm inclined to believe him since, hey, travel writing isn't all daiquiris on beaches and Mai Thais on mountaintops, either. But Eugene Fodor, it turns out, was every bit as dashing and bad-ass as the rest of us travel scribes only pretend to be.

He was a spy. And he hired other spies to write for him. No joke. From the AP:

According to Hunt, Fodor had worked as a spy in Austria when the Office of Strategic Services became the CIA and continued in intelligence for 12 to 15 years. Fodor tried to keep the lid on in late 1974 and early `75, fearing relatives of his Czech-born wife could be put in danger. But pressed by the paper's expose, he acknowledged his covert work _ and his hiring of many guidebook writers who were CIA spies during the Cold War.

"But I told them to make sure and send me real writers, not civil engineers. I wanted to get some writing out of them. And I did, too," Fodor told the Times in June 1975.

In unrelated guidebook-related news, I was kind of amused by this post on Esquire.com about "Great Moments in Italian Food History," specifically this line:

1960 — Arthur Frommer's book Europe on $5 a Day becomes a bestseller; tens of thousands of young Americans travel to Italy

Truth. And Chef Boyardee, among others, piggybacked on the new American fascination with this sauce-covered deliciousness. For more on that, step right this way, please.

Outtakes: Pastries in Brussels

2011-03-21T07:45:00.001-05:00

Alas, I had to cut this from the book. When we were in Brussels, Lee wrote a guest post about my pastry problem. I'm not sure if he was feeling guilty (not that he should have) or just being the all-around good guy he is, but here's what happened the next morning:

Most mornings, I was the first to arise, but I move so slowly before breakfast that by the time I showered and got dressed and got my satchel ready for the day's explorations, Lee had already done the same, plus completed his daily reps of push-ups and stretches, and written a page or two of his work-in-progress, a space pirate opera.

This time, he hadn't waited around. Probably a wise move, I realized, given that my brain was starting up more slowly than usual. There turned out to be a second light show a half-hour or so after the first one, and shortly after that was done, a jazz band somewhere down the street struck up “The Girl From Impanema,” the horn section trying its best to drown out the rhythmically-challenged drummer in an epic battle of beats and noise. The clear losers were our ears and desire for sleep. So I had called in reinforcements as soon as the second show began, downing a couple of Tylenol PM pills and shoving some earplugs in until they practically tickled my tonsils. This appeared to have done the trick, perhaps too well. I stumbled to the bathroom, shooed the pigeons from the open window and slammed it shut, then stepped into the shower, letting the initial blast of ice water hit me full in the face.

When I emerged from the bathroom, Lee was sitting on his bed, writing. There was a yellow bakery bag on the desk a few feet away; the smell of fresh croissant perfumed the air. “Mornin',” he grinned. “I got something for you.”

“Feeding my addiction?”

“Might as well. Fighting it is clearly a lost cause.”

I have to confess to finding this very touching, but also a bit worrisome: Did I trust him—anyone—to select a pastry for me? It's a serious question. I have standards. Breaking bread together may be one of the most deeply-rooted symbols of friendship, but what if the bread turns out to be crap? A kind gesture turns into a deal-breaker, and then what do you do?

Still, when someone offers me a croissant, I will not turn it down, even if I will immediately start thinking of potential diversions, should I need to spit it out.

I needn't have worried. I should have known, by this point, to trust Lee. The croissant was hot and flaky and gooey and delicious. We planned our day as we ate, spilling crumbs all over the map.

Actual experts on technology's effects on travel

2011-03-16T07:27:00.004-05:00

From The Guardian, via Mike Sowden (a.k.a. @Mikeachim): Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Rolf Potts, and other travel writers weigh in on technology and travel. Specifically: "Has technology robbed travel of its riches?"

As usual, Pico Iyer nails it, with an observation I completely agree with but in words far better than my own:

My talisman as a traveller has always been that old chestnut from Proust, that "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new sights, but in seeing with new eyes". A place is boring only if you bring uninterested eyes to it. Some people say that democratic travel has removed the magic of places, but to me that magic is just as strong as ever (in Petra, in La Paz, even in my hometown of Oxford) if it is real. Garbo never grows old, nor Dylan young. When we worry that a place we love has changed – "Bali isn't what it used to be," I sometimes hear myself saying, "It's usually because we have changed."

The whole thing is worth a read ...

Tourists in denial

2011-03-15T15:29:00.000-05:00

Proof positive that it's time to retire the term "traveler, not tourist" and all variations thereof: this ad from Delta's in-flight magazine, Sky. Click on the photo for a close-up of the full text. I've also seen Minneapolis light rail trains wrapped in a version of this ad, including that tag line.

100 ways social media will make your travel experience, like, SO much more authentic and enlightening and off the beaten path and, you know, all that awesome stuff. Also, Justin Bieber (is not mentioned anywhere in this post).

2011-03-06T10:15:00.000-06:00

Trying out a new SEO tactic here. You know, like the cool kids. You'll see why. Also, this post really isn't as grouchy as that headline might lead you to believe.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. From today's Washington Post:

Crowdsourcing a Panama trip

Less than 24 hours after I announced on Facebook that I was heading to Panama, the tips started rolling in.

... Never mind that I hadn't seen these people in years. They were my Facebook friends, and I was willing to take their advice. I am, after all, a Facebook junkie.

Which is why I was thrilled to discover several new Web sites that merge my two favorite things: social media and travel. TripAdvisor recently integrated its site with Facebook so that you can see where your "friends" have visited and read any reviews they've posted. Other Web sites - Gogobot, IgoUgo,Travellerspoint and Tripping, among others - are creating communities of travelers Facebook-style.

So I wondered: Could I toss aside my guidebooks and plan an entire trip based on tips from virtual friends? Could I, in social media lingo, crowdsource a vacation?

Now, if you just read the first page (of three) and the last couple of paragraphs of the article, you could easily get the distinct impression that the conclusion is this: guidebooks are dead--social media is the only way to go! All hail social media! Now, I've already ~~ranted about~~ offered oh-so-insightful comments on some of this before, but it's worth revisiting it, especially because I think this Post article offers a more complete picture, even if you have to sort of read between the lines to see it.

I'm guessing various bloggers and Facebookers are going to latch onto those themes without a second thought, never mind that the writer, Nancy Trejos, encounters some serious setbacks, namely: (a) she gets too many tips and ends up trying to do too many things, and (b) a bunch of the tips are total duds.

In short, the experience is hit-or-miss--like most travel methods. But here's a kind of maybe REALLY IMPORTANT observation that passes by without any real comment: the things that save the trip are:
Serendipity.
A local expert.

After a series of frustrations, Ms. Trejos comes to prefer the advice of that local expert, a friend-of-a-friend who works for the UN.

In other words, the true lesson to draw from the article is that you're ultimately best-served by relying on the exact same thing that travelers have been relying on for, well ... forever. The person on the ground. The local expert. Also, it helps if that person works for the UN or is otherwise someone with an outsider's perspective but an insider's knowledge.

And, yes, social media can help you work your network to find that expert. Granted. But, let's face it, there are many other ways, aside from Facebook and the like, to make those contacts. Online crowdsourcing is just one more means to that end. And sometimes it just gets in the way.

Of course, that conclusion won't get you a lot of Diggs and "likes" and retweets. It's not great SEO. A few months back, the Post's inimitable Gene Weingarten had a column about the "new media"-oriented newsroom.
Every few days at The Washington Post, staffers get a notice like this: "Please welcome Dylan Feldman-Suarez, who will be joining the fact-integration team as a multiplatform idea triage specialist, reporting to the deputy director of word-flow management and video branding strategy. Dylan comes to us from the social media utilization division of Sikorsky Helicopters."
I can't help but wonder if that social media emphasis becomes self-perpetuating: social media loves social media, so social media types get all excited when someone talks about social media. (Still with me?)

And I strongly suspect that's the ultimate reason that this travel article doesn't play up what seem to be its most important points: not much has changed, actually. At the top of page one of that article, there's a slide show sidebar (say that five times fast). The caption reads:
Panama: Off the beaten path
Nancy Trejos discovered Panama's hidden gems thanks to recommendations from her online social network.

Wait. No, she didn't. At least, not really, since her online friends led her astray just as often, and her best guide was--say it with me now--THE LOCAL EXPERT.

I guess honesty isn't very SEO-friendly.

(You know what is SEO-friendly, though? Cliches. Can we please please have a moratorium on "off the beaten path," at least in headlines?)

Quote of the day: the tourist as "noxious animal"

2011-03-04T08:10:00.002-06:00

The term "tourist" dates to 1776, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It didn't take long for it to become an insult. Here's the English diarist Francis Kilvert, writing c. 1870:

What was our horror on entering the enclosure to see two tourists with staves and shoulder belts all complete postured among the ruins in an attitude of admiration, one of them of course discoursing learnedly to his gaping companion and pointing out objects of interest with his stick. If there is one thing more hateful than another it is being told what to admire and having objects pointed out to one with a stick. Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, illbred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.

Tahrir Square as tourist landmark

2011-02-26T10:54:00.000-06:00

It was inevitable, of course--but, damn, that was fast. From the NY Times:

The allure of visiting Egypt at this moment hasn’t been lost on some tour operators. For example, Akorn Destination Management (akorndmc.com), which bills itself as an organization that delivers “inspirational travel experiences,” is offering “Tahrir Square — Egypt Is Making History,” a trip that includes a Nile cruise, a walk through Tahrir Square and a stay at the Semiramis InterContinental Hotel, which is near the square.

As Rick Zeolla, the general manager of the Cairo Marriott, where Christiane Amanpourand many other journalists stayed, put it: “Right now Egypt is like having a fast pass at Disney. People should come over.”

Outtakes: Doing the Tourist Dance at the Roman Forum

2011-02-25T08:21:00.001-06:00

The Tourist Dance is the new Macarena, the new Electric Slide, the new Soulja Boy. You do it at a tourist site by walking up to someone and holding out your camera and quickly pointing to yourself and the other person and the camera. At major landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, your Tourist Dance partner is probably already approaching you when you start. So you both point and ask, "Foto?" and laugh awkwardly and take each other's pictures. Also works as a great icebreaker at tourists sites. Seriously. Anyway, a funny thing happened, uh, at the Forum ...

I approached a sixty-ish British couple and initiated the Tourist Dance. When I handed my camera to the man, he started walking away. His wife called out to him, “Dear! Where are you going?”

“I've got to get back quite a ways to get the whole thing in the photo with the man,” he said. His tone was proper but gruff, and his thick white mustache bounced with authority as he spoke. If you'd swapped his Nike cap for a pith helmet and given him a monocle, he could have been a classic British general in a far-flung outpost. He turned and yelled for me to smile. His wife stepped out of the way--although, as it turned out, not far enough.

The General strode back and showed off his handiwork. “Got just about the whole thing in there!”

I was basically a speck at the bottom of the image.

“Yes, and you forgot the poor man in the midst of it all,” the General's wife said. She took my camera. “Right then, love, let's have another go--one where your friends can see you without squinting. ”

Much better. "Now your friends will know you really were here," she said.

Below: their two efforts.

Life of a travel writer in two photos

2011-02-19T12:00:00.001-06:00

I love this life, but sometimes a reality-check is in order. (See also, among others, Lee's comments on the not-so-glamorous life of a travel writer, and Alexis Grant's recent post on the same subject.) Right now, eleven days until book deadline, I'm reminded that for every single day I spend here:

... I can count on another--What? Four? Ten? Twenty?--days here:

(And if you panned right just a bit, you'd see another shelf of research books, plus a dozen over-stuffed folders with magazines, my notes, and my parents' letters.)

Explorers, tourists, and "mere travelers"

2011-02-15T07:30:00.000-06:00

I've finally started reading David Grann's The Lost City of Z (thanks to Jason for the loan), about the early 20th-century British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest--which becomes Grann's own--for the fabled city of the title, which is supposedly hidden in the Amazon jungle. A phenomenal read so far.

Because of the way my brain is wired right now (two weeks to finish a book!), this section jumped out at me:

As Jack and Raleigh [Percy Fawcett's fellow-expeditioners] now excitedly stepped on board the ship [to South America], they encountered dozens of stewards, in starched white uniforms, rushing through the corridors with telegrams and bon voyage fruit baskets. . . . The conditions bore little resemblance to those that had prevailed when Fawcett made his first South American voyage, two decades earlier . . . Now everything was designed to accommodate the new breed of tourists--"mere travelers," as Fawcett dismissed them, who had little notion of "the places which today exact a degree of endurance and a toll of life, with the physique necessary to face dangers."

Emphasis mine. I like Fawcett's implied distinction: not between "travelers" and "tourists" (and, yes, enough with that) but between "mere travelers" (that is, tourists) and those on true expeditions. That, I think, is a worthwhile distinction. And, yes, those people doing that race in Antarctica are still "mere travelers"--at least until they start doing some research or show some purpose higher than bragging rights.

Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places: Bridge of Sighs

2011-02-13T13:40:00.005-06:00

Okay, cheating here a bit: that's not the Bridge of Sighs you see in the photo below (just beneath the billboard).* It's the bridge from which you can see Bridge of Sighs--the place where you stand to take in one of the world's most famously romantic views. Which is now framed by massive ads for diamond jewelry--because commodified romance is so much more alluring than the natural variety.

Happy Valentine's Day!

* Somewhere I have a photo of the view toward the Bridge of Sighs, but I can't find it just now. It basically looks like this.

The package tour of the road less traveled, part III

2011-02-01T23:29:00.005-06:00

Y'know, I really don't mean to pick on the New York Times travel section. And yet I see that I've recently blogged about several of their stories, and I'm about to do so again. So allow me to note that it's the travel section that I read the most, so by default it's the place where I find the most comment-worthy stories. They publish some great stuff (recent favorites include this and this). Someday, I'd love to see my own byline there. I'm probably not doing myself any favors with the Newspaper In Which I Would Most Like To Have My Own Book Reviewed (preferably positively ...) by cherry-picking examples of just how silly it can be sometimes.

Still with me? Okay, here we go. Thing is some of the NYT's stories, man ... They just keep hitting some of the classic tropes of travel writing, the themes and adjectives I love to hate. Like this "Practical Traveler" blog post, in which I have added my own running tally of road-less-traveled cliches (my numbers in grey):

Beat the Crowds to Up-and-Coming Destinations

The upside of visiting an emerging destination is pristine (1) landscapes, reasonable — if not decidedly cheap — prices and the rare opportunity to experience the authenticity (2) of a place before it’s overrun (3) by tourists.

There are, however, often trade-offs: the lack of a good transportation infrastructure, rudimentary hotel service, and poor medical facilities. Timing a visit can also be tricky in countries where political stability is a relative term. But with an adventurous attitude, the benefits of exploring new places usually outweigh the struggles involved. Ready to lay claim (4) to the next great place? Below, four emerging destinations.
Notes:
(1), (2), (3) I feel like I've just said this, but there's something especially self-centered and absurd--even odious--about the mindset that you just know a place is about to become "spoiled" or lose its so-called authenticity, so you have to get there first. That is, you need to help destroy it before others can. Don't forget: travel is a race! Whoever gets there first gets more Authenticity Gold Stars!
(4) I know it's a blog post and I shouldn't get too hung up on word choice (goodness, if anyone started parsing the phrasing of my own hastily-scribbled posts, well, I'm sure I'd cringe). But I do think that the expression "lay claim" is telling--it gets at the same authenticity-seeking mentality and also betrays a certain manifest destiny attitude. The place is mine--the tourist's--for the taking. If I get there first, I get to keep it.
Discuss.

And I promise that my next post will have absolutely nothing to do with the Times.

The package tour of the road less travel, part II

2011-01-23T17:32:00.004-06:00

Everything this blog (and my book) is not, Exhibit A, from the Times:

In India, Luxury Arrives in a Himalayan Haven

THE little boy in the maroon robe had me at “Julé.” As his friends flitted about pouring yak-butter tea into tourists’ bowls, he limped toward the back of the windowless Thiksey monastery’s prayer hall, heavy copper pot trailing behind him. He offered a small serving of the creamy broth, a flash of Chiclet-like baby teeth and that Ladakhi greeting. Then he slipped back into his row and began to sway to the rhythm of the surrounding chants.

... The journey we took was a half-week of walking and driving for $515 per person per night, starting in Leh and meandering to Stok and Nimoo — towns separated by death-defying overpasses and landslide-scarred valley walls. It promised all the exoticism of Tibet with all the grand service of Raj India.

So. Where to begin? Or perhaps I'll just let this speak for itself as I stare in slack-jawed amazement, especially at that last sentence above.

Have at it in the comments, if you like.

(Via my friend Arijit.)

Guidebooks vs. the internet, part 9829

2011-01-19T07:10:00.000-06:00

From Sunday's New York Times:

Narrowing the Choices, Online

When it comes to planning a vacation, travelers can either spend hours online figuring out where to go, which flights and hotels to book, and what to do when they get there, or they can call a travel agent to figure it out for them. Now, a new breed of members-only Web sites is offering something in between.

Call it the curated search. These hybrid sites aim to eliminate much of the annoyance of online trip planning by winnowing the selection of hotels and destinations to an edited list, which has been vetted to appeal to the sensibilities of affluent travelers

Gosh, what a concept! You know what would be even better? If they printed those recommendations and compiled them into a dead-tree edition! But "curated search" is kind of a mouthful. Let's come up with a new name.

Call it ... a guidebook.

By the numbers: writing-a-book edition

2011-01-18T07:34:00.031-06:00

I finished my first full draft on Sunday! Woohoo!

Date of book deal: 2 June 2010
Date of completing full draft: 16 January 2011
Form of celebration: Surly Darkness! And a delicious, impromptu feast of pasta and pork tenderloin (thanks, Sebastian and Becky!)
Manuscript deadline: 1 March 2011
Editing that I need do before then: Well ... a lot
Target word count: 70,000-75,000
Current word count: 91,810 (gulp)
Total chapters: 12
First word: It
Last word: Friends
Most over-used punctuation: em dash
Elements of Style rules broken: probably all of them
Shortest paragraph: 1 word ("And.")
Longest paragraph: 374 words
Shortest section: 32 words
Longest section: 1,598 words
General section-length target when writing: no more than 800 words
Shortest chapter: Zurich (just barely beating out Brussels)
Longest chapter: Vienna
Median (length) chapter: Amsterdam
Easiest chapters to write: Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Madrid
Amount of time spent on each of those chapters: about two weeks each
Most difficult chapters to write: Paris, Venice
Amount of time spent on those chapters: about a month each
Rough percentage of time spent writing in various locations:
... at desk/table in apartment: 10
... at downtown Minneapolis library: 20
... in easy chair in apartment: 60
... in other locations (e.g. coffee shops, various places while traveling): 10
Percentage written while not wearing pants: 92 (kidding!)
Cities included in "other locations" (i.e. where I wrote on the road): New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Seattle, Key West
Preferred writing fuel: Bolthouse Farms' Blue Goodness Smoothie
Preferred writing music: Pandora station with classical guitar, instrumental jazz/hip-hop, low-key electronic (nothing catchy, nothing with lyrics)
Computer mice killed in the process of writing: 1
Post-It flags currently in my copy of Europe on $5 a Day, marking Important Things I'm not sure I ever got around to mentioning: 12
Books used as sources for research component of writing: at least 20-30 (I'll try to compile a list and post it sometime)
Newspaper/magazine articles: countless
Frequency of selected words in draft:

... tourist, tourists, touristic, or tourism: 433 (!!)

... travel, traveler, or traveling: 269

... Arthur: 229

... Lee: 176

... Mom or mother: 130

... I: 2,092 (Yikes! Well, it is a first-person memoir)

... croissant, pain au chocolat, or pastry: 17

... awkward, awkwardly, nervous, nervously: 14

... whizzer: 1 (regarding Manneken Pis, "the wee whizzer")

The 125 most common words in my current draft

Tour guides with extended cameos in book: 4

Number of those tour guides used as case study of everything wrong with tourism: 1

Readers of various sections and/or the proposal that started this all: 11 (in the aggregate; some have read only a few pages, others have read everything, all were invaluable)
Special thanks to the superstar readers: Hannah, Jason, Frank, Maggie
... And the proposal guru: Dennis
... And especially the sidekick and reader extraordinaire: the one and only Lee
... And! My brilliant and supportive agent and editor, without whom, no book: Elizabeth Evans and Marian Lizzi
Amount of my gratitude to you all: Boundless. (Wow, that really sounds cold and rote when it's just shoved into a list. Really, truly: molto grazie, all; I'm fortunate to have such a good network.)
Amount of time I plan to take off from working on or even thinking about the book before diving headlong into the editing: two weeks
Likelihood of me actually resisting revisiting/tweaking/obsessively worrying in that amount of time: Ha! Probably nil. But it's a goal.
Anxiety that I forgot some important point or left out a crucial scene or didn't include enough history or enough jokes ... or generally screwed up and everyone's gonna hate it: Pretty high, to be honest
General contentment with how it's all turned out, in spite of the above: Also pretty high. Go figure.

The package tour of the road less traveled

2011-01-16T09:47:00.004-06:00

Is there a single part of the world today that does not have its own package tour? I rather doubt it. "Off the beaten path" has become just another marketing phrase, one used to attract the authenticity-seekers who are so over the tourist trails of Europe and Southeast Asia. There comes a point, though, when that endless--and, importantly, mass--quest for the unspoiled becomes not just absurd but wholly unsustainable.

I think we've reached that point. Two articles from the New York Times in the past week provide ample evidence. First up, from last week's big "41 Places to Go in 2011" package (with my emphasis added at the end):

34. Iraqi Kurdistan
As United States forces withdraw from Iraq, a handful of intrepid travel companies are offering trips to the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, which has enjoyed relative safety and stability in recent years.

...

Visitors can tour significant cultural landmarks like Erbil’s citadel, which dates to the Assyrian empire, and the site of the Battle of Gaugamela, which ended in the defeat of the Persian king Darius III by Alexander the Great and led to the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. The biggest lure is the opportunity for authentic cultural encounters. “Authenticity is something that can be lost so quickly as development occurs,” said Janet Moore, of Distant Horizons.

Yes, correct, it's true: with development comes a decline in authenticity. Now, development can have plenty of positive effects, too--improved medical care, infrastructure, economic growth, etc.--but never mind all that, we want authenticity! But who can tell me where the first wave of development and authenticity-leech might come from? Tourists, perhaps?

And now on to the second article, from yesterday's Times:

Tourists Mimic Polar Pioneers, Except With Planes and Blogs

When the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find that he had been beaten there by Roald Amundsen and his team of Norwegians, he was despondent. “Great God! This is an awful place,” he lamented in his diary.

Awful as it may be, it is about to get a lot of foot traffic. Hundreds of people — tourists, adventurers and history buffs — are lining up to visit the South Pole in honor of the 100th anniversaries of Amundsen’s arrival (on Dec. 14, 1911) andScott’s (Jan. 17, 1912). The preparations are already speeding along.

...

Needless to say, people will not want to replicate Scott’s entire expedition. He and his men died in a blizzard during the 800-mile trek back from the pole, huddled in a tent that was, famously, just 11 miles from a vital cache of supplies.

Instead, many people plan to ski to the pole, then fly back. One of them is Matt Elliott, a 28-year-old Briton, who will compete in a 440-mile ski race, pulling 200 pounds of gear the whole way. A resident of Windsor, he works for his family’s paper wholesaling business and calls himself “a complete polar novice.”

He has never tried cross-country skiing, and he is not a big fan of cold weather, but he has been practicing by dragging two car tires on a rope for several hours at a time.

“I want to know how far, physically, I can go,” said Mr. Elliott, who is paying about $95,000 to enter the competition, sponsored by a London-based company called Extreme World Races. “It would be great to get there first and run the Union Jack at the South Pole before the Norwegians get there,” he said.

It's tempting to be snarky and note that this can't end well and wonder if Jon Krakauer will be on hand to write the book about the inevitable disaster this will turn out to be. But I don't want to joke; it's really not funny. Truly: this is a tragedy waiting to happen (though I'd love to be wrong). This guy has never skied before, and surely he isn't the only member of this group who is astonishingly ill-prepared, but who seems to think that writing a big check and training in entirely different conditions (not on skis, not in the cold) is all the preparation he needs. All in the name of ... what? Competition? Hubris? I can think of a hundred ways to prove yourself with less chance of dying. The Ironman Triathlon, for one.

The article continues:

David Wilson, a great-nephew of Edward Wilson, the naturalist and sketch artist who marched to the pole with Scott and died beside him, will join other descendants of Scott’s polar party in Antarctica next Jan. 17 in the vicinity of the tent, where they will hold a memorial service.

He echoes the Scott party line: that the British expedition went to Antarctica to do science, not to race to the pole. The people planning competitions are “completely misunderstanding what happened 100 years ago,” Dr. Wilson said.

Despite the potential circus atmosphere, some veterans insist that Antarctica is not for novices.

“It’s a place that wants you dead,” said Robert Swan, an environmentalist who walked Scott’s route to the South Pole in 1985. “Scott found that out 100 years ago.”

Seriously: there are some places tourists shouldn't go. For their own good.

And also for the good of the place. Look, I get the appeal of the authentic and unspoiled and untouched (here, travel journalists, have some more synonyms). There's nothing so transcendent, so stirring, as beauty in the raw.

But I'll say it again: it's not sustainable. Even if the Antarctic tourists don't die (and, truly, I wish them all the best), there's a good chance some of them will have to be rescued. They'll leave garbage. And even just by being there, as tourists, they send a message to the rest of the world: come on down! Anyone can do this! It's totally extreme ... and totally awesome! I await the filming of the first sports-drink commercial with Shaun White snowboarding down a glacier and doing a McTwist 1260 over some startled penguins.

In a 1972 profile of Arthur Frommer for Harper's, Stanley Elkin observed, "It's no accident that Arthur Frommer, the Pill, and credit cards are simultaneous phenomena. Everybody deserves everything. You only live once. Screwing for everybody and Europe for everybody too. This is the egalitarian key to a proper understanding of Europe on Five Dollars a Day."

Today, it's not just "Europe for everybody." It's "the whole world for everybody." And as much as I like the notion that travel is becoming more egalitarian, I can't help but recoil at the perception that it's everyone's birthright to see everything, do everything. Not sustainable, not sustainable.

It's time to put the brakes on this kind of tourism. Not that anyone from the New York Times travel section or Conde Nast Traveler or Travel + Leisure or, for that matter, Budget Travel reads this blog, but if they did, here's what I'd say: please stop with the lists and stop with the authentic and stop with the endless quest for the unspoiled. I know it's a game you play. I know it gets the readers who draw the advertisers who pay your salary. I know you like to talk up "green" travel and ecotourism (although I respectfully submit that there's no such thing as a truly environmentally-friendly lodge in the rainforest, especially one that then attracts more people and more lodges to a place that was truly untouched and ... well, there goes the neighborhood).

But. Maybe it's time to rethink things a bit. How about an article or two embracing the beaten path, finding new ways to appreciate the seemingly-cliched cities and landmarks? How about mentioning that the truest ecotourism is to leave these "unspoiled" places alone--not to rush to get there first so you can later brag that you saw them before they got overrun? How about acknowledging that we're all tourists, no matter how far-flung, and what matters is not finding something your friends haven't found but appreciating and understanding that thing--that culture, that place, that food--on your own terms, in your own way? (Oh, and if you want someone to write a story with an offbeat take on the beaten path, well, I might know someone ...)

Of late, one of the big culinary trends, at least the US, has been classic comfort food done right. Witness the rise of the gastropubs like the Spotted Pig in New York or the nouveau diners like my hometown favorite, the Town Talk Diner--places that take hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and the like and remix them, often with high-end ingredients. There's a parallel phenomenon of street-food fusion, such as the Los Angeles food-truck phenom Kogi, which serves Korean barbecue tacos.

I think it's time for the travel world to follow suit, to embrace the familiar but in unfamiliar ways, to find the new angle on the old cliche. One of my favorite things about traveling on the beaten path is that it's the crossroads of the world--you meet people from the Official Local Culture but also immigrants who live there now and tourists from all over the globe. In Brussels, you can eat frites and doner kebabs with EU officials, Malaysian tourists, and Algerian-immigrant locals (to be sure, this particular scene is possibly an idealistic pipe dream ... but then, so are most of the touristic visions of Provence or Bali). The New Old World ain't just churches and museums and stuffy restaurants, so don't treat it like a static, monolithic place.

Or there are the places that have stood the test of time, becoming tourist traps, yes, but gloriously so--the Hofbrauhaus in Munich, Casa Botin in Madrid, landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum. These are places with stories and history; there's a reason they're iconic, there's a reason people go there. And that's one of the other things I love about the beaten path: that sense of being part of something collective, of trying to understand the reasons why so many people come here. What is that history? What are those stories?

I could go on, but the Madrid chapter is calling me and, well, you probably take my point by now. If there's one theme I harp on throughout this blog, perhaps too much, it's this: there are plenty of stories left to tell on the beaten path, because it's always evolving, developing unexpected contours and detours and landmarks. It might take some extra effort to find those interesting things, but they're there, all over, sometimes hiding in plain sight.

So if you're reading this, travel magazine editors, there's a story for you. And please stop with the authenticity-hype. I can think of a few tourists in Antarctica who will soon be deeply regretting that they didn't stay on the beaten path.

Outtakes: a time-warp deli in Rome

2011-01-07T07:26:00.002-06:00

Cut from the Rome chapter.

“Rome is a difficult town in which to find a budget restaurant,” Arthur Frommer writes in Europe on $5 a Day. “There are only three small areas in this entire large city where you'll discover anything resembling a cluster of good, low-cost eating spots.”

Thankfully, that's changed.Even when I found one of Arthur's recommendations still open, it turned out still to be budget-friendly—and good. Just now, I tracked down a place called Il Delfino for a late lunch. It's basically a Roman deli with, Arthur says, “a marvelous array of spit-roasted chickens, hors d'oeuvre counters, pizza ovens.” Exactly. Arthur commanded me to have pizza, and who was I to disobey? I munched contentedly as I soaked up the atmosphere: the conversations at a low-level buzz and, as far as I could tell, all in Italian (read: no tourists); the families with kids bearing sauce-enhanced grins; the endless array of foods spread behind the counter. It felt exactly like Arthur described it, like I'd stepped into a portal back to the 1960s. If Norman Rockwell were Italian, he would have painted this scene.

A word cloud full of tourists

2011-01-01T16:41:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year! Here, have some confetti, or at least a bunch of words. Pictured: the 125 most common words in my working draft (eleven chapters done, one to go). Click on photo for full size.

Made with Wordle.

New Year's resolution: cut back on the use of "seemed" (upper right).

On the road with Chinese Grand Tourists

2010-12-28T10:12:00.000-06:00

The Economist has an interesting, amusing, and astonishingly in-depth profile of some of the newest Grand Tourists:

A sketch map of the Chinese grand tour must begin in France, the country seen as offering all the essential European virtues: history, romance, luxury and quality. Paris shops such as Louis Vuitton are essential stops: witness their Mandarin-speaking staff. In 2009 Chinese tourists passed Russians as the highest-spending non-European visitors to France, according to a survey of duty-free shops. The south of the country is also popular, thanks in part to widely available translations of Peter Mayle’s book “A Year in Provence” and in part to a slushy Chinese television mini-series, “Dreams Link”, which was filmed amid the lavender fields and walled citadels of the Midi.

Outtakes: the Vatican gift shop

2010-12-27T15:33:00.000-06:00

I don't think I have anything interesting or new to say about the Vatican, so I've decided to strike that scene from the book. But there was one exchange that I overheard, in the gift shop, that was too amazing not to share:

Male British tourist to female cashier: “Excuse me, do you sell action figures of the Pope? Ones that move?”

The cashier's eyes widened in horror. “No! Not here!”

“Do you know where I could get one?”

Long pause. Double-blink. Sigh. “Try a shop by Saint Peter's Square.”

Graph of the day: traveler vs tourist mentions in books, 1900-2008

2010-12-24T12:27:00.005-06:00

Google estimates that it has scanned some 10 percent of all books, ever. And here comes Google Ngram Viewer to allow you to track mentions of words or phrases in their scanned database--in other words, to allow you to spend massive amounts of time being distracted (arugula vs. iceberg lettuce, Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer).

Traveler (blue) vs. tourist (red), 1900-2008 (click for larger version):

Note that "tourist" takes over for good in the mid-1950s--exactly when the budget tourism boom was beginning.

Quote of the day: "I am the Tourist" (in 1876)

2010-12-23T11:21:00.000-06:00

If any one knows what a tourist is, and what he is capable of, I am that person. I have watched the tourist at his work from a non-tourist stand-point. I have heard and considered the opinion of others about him, and have formed my own. I have seen him ill-treated in print, I have myself assailed him on a printed page, and I have been taken to task by certain journalistic defenders of the Philistine faith for doing so.

On the other hand, I am for the time being the person I have criticized. De me faula narratur. I am myself the Tourist . . .

- John LaTouche, "The Tourist in Portugal," from The New Quarterly Magazine (London), April-July 1876.

Quote of the day: the key to a happy journey is ... booze

2010-12-17T07:26:00.016-06:00

As I approach T-minus two months until manuscript deadline, this quote makes more and more sense:

But when all is said and done, perhaps the most valuable commodity for the tourist, whether he is along the French Riviera in a yacht or ploughing through unmapped areas of urban forest, is alcohol. It is the universal language, the Esperanto, through which contact can be made with people of the most remote sympathies; it passes agreeably the leaden hours of waiting for trains and boats and mail; it gently obliterates one's rage at inefficient subordinates and soothes one's own exhaustion and irritation; it renders one oblivious to mosquitoes, calms one's apprehensions of being lost or catching fever; it gives glamour to the empty, steaming nights of the tropics. With a glass in his hand, the tourist can gaze out on the streets of Tangier, teeming with English governesses and retired colonels, and happily imagine himself a Marco Polo.

- Evelyn Waugh, The Tourist's Manual* [EDIT: not The Tourist Manifesto, as I originally had it.]

--
*This is the same essay, by the way, that gave us the immortal line, "The tourist is the other fellow," more often misquoted--including by me, on this blog--as "The tourist is always the other chap." The whole piece is a brilliant satirical rebuttal to the "I'm a traveler, not a tourist" types. What's most striking is how fresh and modern the voice feels in its snarky but erudite tone--even though it was written in 1934. Alas, it's not available online. In fact, I consider it one of the great lost works of travel writing; it deserves a place in the canon and the ongoing conversation. More on that some other time. (And if you ask nicely, I might know a guy who has a PDF ...)

Please do not feed the tourists

2010-12-04T09:43:00.000-06:00

From Engrish.com via my friend Frank Bures.

Discovering and rediscovering and re-rediscovering Venice in winter

2010-11-28T16:47:00.001-06:00

This just in: The New York Times' travel section has discovered Venice in the off-season. Again. For the third time in six years.

2010: "Venice in winter"

In summer, Venice is torrid, stuffed to the gills with the 18 million tourists who overwhelm it each year, clogging its bridges, swelling its vaporetti, vastly outnumbering the famously grouchy residents and making the city seem like one big floating Disneyland— a perverse metaphor for the future of Italy, if not all of Europe, a place that has staked its future on selling an image of its past and may yet be destroying itself in the process.

2009: "Frugal Venice, family style" [The link goes to the Frugal Travel blog, but I'm 90 percent sure I saw it on the front page of the travel section when it first came out.]

It is hard to imagine such consideration in the depths of summer, when Venice is descended upon by millions of tourists, who constitute a flood as unnavigable as the acqua alta, or high water, that periodically drenches the city’s sidewalks and campos from September to April.

2004: "Breathing more easily without the throngs"

For anyone who has been to Venice in summer -- when it becomes an Italian theme park, with thousands of tourists jostling for space on the Piazza San Marco, trying to snap a souvenir photo of the Campanile and then lining up for a coffee at Caffe Florian, which opened in 1720 and has presumably been overcharging ever since -- winter can be a revelation. Gone are the cruise ships, the group tours, the throngs of camera-toting daytrippers flooding out of the Santa Lucia train station each morning, guidebook in one hand, stopwatch in the other.

Way to branch out there, guys. And while I certainly agree that Venice in the summer is, well, stuffed to the gills with millions of tourists in search of an Italian theme park . . . I'm also not convinced that telling people to go in the off-season is the best, either, at least not for a tourist hotspot like Venice. Because in the same sense that some people argue that staying on the beaten path is the most ethical way to travel--because you're not beating new paths--one could also make the case that expanding the tourist season in Venice won't cut back on the numbers in the summer; it'll only increase them the rest of the year. (I'm not actually sure I completely believe any of what I'm saying in this post, by the way; I'm mostly just putting it out there for discussion.)

VeniceLand. See that elaborate building? It actually houses a roller coaster.

Personally, I think we should just leave the good people of this famously dying/drowning/theme-park-ifying town alone. Seriously, don't go. Or limit stays to one or two days (or, conversely, mandate week-long stays). Or maybe we can be open to visitors for one month a year. Perhaps we could all work out a deal where, like children of divorced parents, tourists can visit Venice and, say, crumbling Pompeii on alternate weekends, plus the Roman Forum on holidays.

Fill in the blanks: [place] on $[number] a day

2010-11-18T07:50:00.003-06:00

Arthur Frommer didn't just give travelers a strategy for cheap travel. He also inadvertently gave travel writers and other journalists a strategy for cheap headlines. It's not quite as ubiquitous as, say, "land of contrasts" and "off the beaten path," but it's still pretty common. Just last week, the New York Times ran a travel article titled "Los Angeles on $100 a Day."

And a few days before that, when certain conservative politicians and pundits (who apparently hate math as much as they hate President Obama . . .) leveled the charge that the president's trip to Asia was costing $200 million a day, the debunking headlines practically wrote themselves, like this from the Times' Caucus blog: "India on $200 million a day? Not!"

I wondered how common this was, so I put my research assistant, Mr. Google, on the case and was quickly presented with a list of other examples. Like:

A few years back, the Times had a series called "High & Low" (retitled in 2009, in a slight nod to the economic times,"Save or Splurge"). Each entry featured pairs of articles about visiting a particular place on two different budgets: "____ on $250 a Day" and "____ on $1,000 a Day."
From a Space Daily article on the Mars Rover: "Mars on One Million Dollars a Day."

I was also curious, in light of Monday's post about the evolution of the dollar amount in the guidebook titles, to see what amounts people most often plugged into the "on $___ a day" construction. I checked both Google overall and Google News specifically (going back to 1980). Here's a graphic representation of what I found, with the X axis listing the various dollar amounts:

Some notes for the pedants/sticklers/genuinely-curious:
(1) Most of the amounts I looked at were actual amounts used in Frommer's book titles. I added in some other nice, round numbers (e.g. $100, $500) that seemed like logical ones for people to plug into the dollars-a-day construction. One thing that's interesting about this, for example, is that there are considerably more articles that discuss something on $100 a day (14 results) than $95 a day (4), even though the latter was an actual Frommer's guidebook, the last one to have an amount listed in the title, in 2007.
(2) I did several variations of each search, using different phrasing (e.g. 5 dollars, five dollars, $5) and I searched for exact phrases, so that it was always "____ on $_____ a day."
(3) Even so, the link between many of these results and Frommer's guidebook titles is, of course, only coincidental and in passing, having nothing to do with travel, e.g. "even today, many impoverished Martians live on $5 a day."
(4) Still, most of the news results, at least, are indeed clearly intended as a play on Europe on $5 a Day.
(5) Seriously, if you're still reading this, you deserve a prize. Tell you what: let me know you made it this far and I'll write you a haiku.

Greetings from snowy Minneapolis

2010-11-15T11:17:00.002-06:00

[Okay, this isn't about Europe or tourism, but it's, uh, kind of about travel. Hometown travel, anyway.]

On Saturday, it snowed here in Minneapolis. Biggest November snowfall in nineteen years. That night, I went for a walk around the downtown riverfront area, one of my favorite spots in the city--hell, in the whole world (not that I'm biased or anything)--and took some photos.* Enjoy!

* Thanks much to @maggiekb1 and Boing Boing for picking up the top photo after I posted it to Twitter on Saturday night. My moment of very minor internet fame, I guess--at least until that video of me doing karaoke with Lady Gaga and Nicolas Sarkozy finally surfaces.

From $5 to $95: the evolution of a guidebook budget

2010-11-15T07:44:00.002-06:00

You used to be able to find the Europe on $__ a Day guidebooks listed on the Frommers.com web site, here. Now you land on a page reading "404 error - page not found." The metaphor is all too obvious, all too cheap, yet still retains some essential poignancy: the guidebook that led millions of people around unfamiliar terrain is now lost itself.

The "dollar-a-day" books ended in 2007, fifty years after it started; the final version was Europe on $95 a Day. The timeline below shows how the titular amount evolved over the years. Just for kicks, I've added the inflation-adjusted worth of $5 in 1957; these amounts are listed in brackets (and for the record, according to the US government, $5 in 1957 has the same buying power as $38.87 now--in general terms, if not in travel terms).

1957: Europe on $5 a Day

1972: Europe on $5 and $10 a Day [$7.44]

1979: Europe on $15 a Day [$12.92]

1981: Europe on $20 a Day [$16.17]

1987: Europe on $25 a Day [$20.21]

1990: Europe on $40 a Day [$23.26]

1991: Europe on $45 a Day [$24.23]

1996: Europe on $50 a Day [$27.92]

2000: Europe From $60 a Day (note the change in wording!) [$30.64]

2000: Europe From $70 a Day

2007: Europe From $95 a Day [$36.89]

(Note: I wasn't always able to determine the precise year of each title change, so in some cases it's an educated guess based on the earliest publication date I was able to find for the title.)

Outtakes: trying not to be sketchy in Vienna

2010-11-11T07:45:00.005-06:00

The Vienna chapter is a bit bloated and unwieldly; I'm trimming it into shape right now. Here's a scene I ended up cutting:

My stomach grumbled. I trekked on and bought a pastry, ordering in flawless German. It had a distinctly Old World taste, that of thousand-year-old church mortar. I cursed in flawless English.

My sinus headache roared. My throat itched. My feet ached—everything ached, actually, from this nasty cold and from the washboard mattress at the hostel. I wandered into a park to sit for a while and dig into the bag of cough drops that I'd bought. There were several open benches near the entrance, and I started to sit down but thought better of it upon piecing together the circumstances: the benches were facing a playground filled with kids. And I was a single man. Specifically, I was a weirdo clutching a battered paperback and what appeared to be a bag of candy, and staring with watery, twitchy eyes. Perhaps in Austria, such persons are considered good luck, but I wasn't about to test it. I kept walking and found another cluster of benches, each with a man sitting alone.

“Excuse me,” I asked one. “Is this the area for the non-pedophiles?”

Well, that's what was implied, anyway, in my simple, “Gutten tag,” croaked as I sat heavily on the opposite end of a bench from him. I dug in my pocket for a tissue, then blew my nose like a trumpet fanfare. The guy eyed me and walked away, toward the playground.

Quote of the day: a tourist is a tourist as a skunk is a skunk

2010-11-08T19:20:00.000-06:00

From Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana:

“Alors, qu'est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?”

“Je suis homme.”

“Quoi?”

“HOMME.”

“Je comprends. Touriste.”

Even “voyageur” is obsolete; and with reason: the word has a complimentary air. The traveller of old was one who went in search of knowledge and whom the indigènes were proud to entertain with their local interests. In Europe this attitude of reciprocal appreciation has long evaporated. But there at least the “tourist” is no longer a phenomenon. He is part of the landscape, and in nine cases out of ten has little money to spend beyond what he has paid for his tour. Here, his is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree.

At the turnstile, that final outrage, a palsied dotard took ten minutes to write out each ticket. After which we escaped from these trivialities into the glory of Antiquity.

The best of touristic intentions ...

2010-11-02T21:39:00.002-05:00

They're the classic antidotes to tourism as usual: packaged tours that combine travel with doing good. Ecotourism gives insight into fragile ecosystems and cultures in transition by providing many of the trappings of standard tourism in a more sustainable package. Dark tourism (a.k.a. grief tourism) provides ostensibly worldview-expanding looks into favelas and former concentration camps and the, well, darker side of life. And voluntourism ... well, the punning name should be self-evident.

All certainly laudable in concept. The intentions are good, and often the results are, too. Buuuut ... just as there's nothing inherently wrong with doing the standard-issue Grand Tour, there's also nothing inherently better about trying to save the world in your two weeks of vacation. Sometimes, alas, you can do more harm than good. NPR's "All Things Considered" tackled the topic of voluntourism today and had some interesting observations:

But in South Africa, some researchers now claim that foreign visitors aren't actually helping the children they work with. In fact, they might be harming them.

The South African government has expressed concern about so-called AIDS orphan tourism, and the Department of Social Development recently said that it will study the issue.

... The psychological literature talks about attachment theory — very young children are programmed to build attachments," she says. "And so, you've got these sort of repeated abandonments — first with young children whose parents may die of AIDS. And then they go to live in an orphanage where you often have high staff turnover."

The process continues when well-meaning tourists come to volunteer their time, she says.

"And then you've got tourists that are coming as sort of the third wave of this abandonment. Children are left behind to remember a series of these foreigners who come in and then leave them there," Norman says.

Quote of the day: guidebook as script

2010-11-01T10:28:00.002-05:00

"Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm* down to the villagers of Chichacestenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to- date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage."

-- Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (1961).

* The Kaiser Wilhelm thing is pretty amazing, actually. I've heard several versions of the anecdote given in this 1950 Time article:

"At the stroke of noon one day, as the imperial military band began its daily concert in front of Berlin's imperial palace, Kaiser Wilhelm interrupted a conference of state by jumping to his feet. "With your kind forbearance, gentlemen," he said, 'I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker [guidebook] that at this hour I always do.' "

NY Times on travel apps vs. guidebooks: "trust books"

2010-10-28T22:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reviews various guidebook iPhone/iPad apps and concludes that the dead-tree editions are still more useful:

I have often found myself ignoring the smartphone while sightseeing. It can be frustrating to repeatedly open an app and navigate an unknown amount of content, often in an unfamiliar format. A book with a dog-eared page, meanwhile, offers instant gratification and gets a traveler back to sightseeing much more quickly.

Notes on Mexico on $5 a Day

2010-10-27T18:02:00.002-05:00

The New York Times' Frugal Traveler has an interesting interview with John Wilcock, who wrote the first editions of Mexico on $5 a Day, Greece on $5 a Day and Japan on $5 a Day in the 1960s:

How did you approach a country like, say, Japan, when there were no prior budget guidebooks to serve as a baseline and no Internet to search on?

I was very lucky in Japan. My column in The Voice had been picked up all over the place, including the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo, and my editor there introduced me to a couple of guys who were doing an underground paper in Tokyo. He also took me all kinds of places I wouldn’t otherwise have found, like a whale meat restaurant and a bear meat restaurant. But there were other people there – as there always are – who speak English or actually are American. After I wrote the Mexico guide, my contacts said, “How did you find all those things? I’ve lived there for years and I only know some of them,” and I said, “Yes, but I spoke to you and 20 other people.”

I find the comments especially interesting. In my edition of E5D, Arthur Frommer notes that some people have been complaining to him that he's not frugal enough--they've traveled the continent for $2 a day or less. (His response is that, sure, it's possible, but he's trying to show how you can do it while still having a modicum of comfort and not sleeping in ditches or fleabag hostels.) A few of those naysayers are still around--and commenting on this blog post.

Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places: the Alps

2010-10-25T10:48:00.002-05:00

Taken during the train ride from Zurich to Vienna:

"Aloha Hawaii Brunch" in a Munich beer hall. Discuss.

2010-10-24T22:04:00.003-05:00

I was just going through my photos from Munich and found this one:

I took this photo in the Ratskeller in Munich. Here's how Arthur describes the restaurant:

Most German cities publicize their food specialties by running a low-priced, municipally-owned restaurant in their City Hall. Munich has one of the best of these. Its Ratskeller, a restaurant in the cellar of its famous, old City Hall on Marienplatz, serves an authentic Bavarian meal in a setting of vaulted oak arches, large beer kegs and rough-hewn wooden tables that could have come from The Student Prince.

In short this is a classic, stereotypical Bavarian restaurant.

But let me call your attention to the list of upcoming events on the board pictured above. Specifically, note the short column on the right side. This, to me, is a classic sign from the European tourist trail. It represents globalization and stereotypes and cultural confusion and strange uses of English.

O-sole-mio Brunch. Cheesy Italian stereotypes to go with your kitschy German stereotypes!
Ratskeller Happy Family Schnitzel Brunch (neu!). Advertised in English, except for the part about how it's new. This I find completely baffling.
Aloha Hawaii Brunch. This makes about as much sense as . . . well having an Oktoberfest celebration on a beach in Hawaii. The two cultures are about as far apart as one can get, I think. I'm trying to figure out what this entails. Pineapple-spiked schnitzel? Or maybe "Bavarian luau" is the next big trend, the next theme restaurant to hit the big time. I can see it: servers in grass skirts and dirndls, dancers doing the hula to "Ein Prosit" . . .

This just in: A Moveable (and Barbecue-filled) Feast

2010-10-23T15:07:00.005-05:00

If forced to choose between a platter of pastries and bucket of barbecue, I'm not sure what I'd say. I'd probably try to distract you and then take both and run away. I didn't eat any barbecue in Europe but shortly before that trip, I went to Kansas City, one of the world's great barbecue towns, for a long-anticipated feast of a roadtrip with my dad.

And now you can read all about it in (this calls for bold-faced text) my story in the new Lonely Planet travel writing anthology, A Moveable Feast.

(Also featured in the book: Jim Benning, Elisabeth Eaves, and--just pulling names randomly here--Pico Iyer, Jan Morris, Anthony Bourdain, Simon Winchester. Edited by Don George.)

Mine is a tale of two scrawny men bonding over inadvisably large quantities of food. If I were writing a movie poster about my story, it might be this: A father, a son, a city with a secret ... about smoked meat. Except that makes it sound too dark. It is anything but. This might work better: Humor! Pathos! Sauce stains! Heartburn!

Now available at your local indie bookstore (which you can find here!) or directly from Lonely Planet or at Powell's ... or (okay, fine) at that big online store that starts with an A.*

So buy a copy or twenty. They make great stocking-stuffers or trivets to put under your Thanksgiving side-dishes or get-well gifts for anyone who has just had major jaw surgery, and whom you secretly hate and want to taunt with a book about all the great meals they can't have with their jaws wired shut like that.

Digging into the good stuff at Arthur Bryant's.

* If you do the "search inside the book" thing, you'll find the story, but rabid tigers armed with lasers will leap from your computer and then your screen will explode in a massive ball of fire ... and you just don't want to deal with that. Seriously. Too much like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Be safe and just buy the book. It's paperback--cheap!

Is social media the new guidebook?

2010-10-08T08:18:00.003-05:00

So this writer for The Guardian is preaching what seems to be a common refrain among the social media lovers: smart phones killed the guidebook dead. Twitter is the only path to travel salvation.

A few choice quotes and rebuttals:

1. A quote about the joys of constant contact.

Four weeks ago I visited Manchester on a short break. I took a change of pants and socks, a spare T-shirt and my mobile phone. When I arrived in the city, I told Twitter that I was hungry, and within minutes I was gorging on corned-beef hash thanks to a recommendation from a fellow Tweeter. I held my phone up to Piccadilly Gardens, turned on an app, and itsWikipedia entry flashed across my screen, overlaid on to the grass in front of me through the camera in my phone. I opened another app, and dozens of local suggestions were hovering around me. There was a bar 288m from where I was standing where I'd get a free drink if I mentioned a secret word to a barman called Angus.

Okay, look, whatever works for you, go for it. I won't pretend that there's One True Way To Travel.

I'll grant you that social media can offer more and better options (in terms of restaurant recommendations and the like) than guidebooks. I mean, there's the potential problem of information overload--you'll probably get too many suggestions and some conflicting opinions--but, okay, if you can sort through it, there's undoubtedly some good stuff there. Guidebooks, in theory, cut to the chase and give you some curated picks (the best of this, the cheapest of that), but if you stick with a guidebook, your options will be limited, and I'm not sure that's necessarily preferable to info-overload. When I did my guided-by-the-masses experiment in Rome, I got some good recommendations and I got some clunkers. No matter what your source of information, your own experience will be hit or miss.

What I find more problematic with the better-living-through-Twitter argument is that it demands not just constant connection with the rest of the world but constant feedback. People joke that Twitter is just a bunch of people posting what they had for breakfast, but I'm more annoyed by all the people who ask, "Where should I have breakfast?"

How about that place right there in front of you, eh? How about asking someone on the street? How about not spending an hour a day seeking advice and validation from your friends back home? How about realizing that you can wander into a dumpy restaurant and have a horrible meal . . . and still get something out of it, a story, a friend, whatever?

Furthermore, when you're checking in with your friends, how much other time are you spending online? Are you also checking Google Maps? Your e-mail? Your RSS feed? Weather? Enough. I've said it before, but I truly think that willful ignorance (up to a point) leads to the most enjoyable travel experiences. Aren't surprise and discovery part of the joy of travel? Shouldn't travel involve getting beyond your existing networks and world views? Shouldn't it be about finding your own way, rather than continually asking your friends for help? All the world need not be a stage, and all your time need not be spent in pursuit of the best, the hippest, the friend-approved. Let loose, get lost, get in to trouble, make NEW friends.

I honestly think that the single most important travel app on a smart phone is the off button. Make it up as you go along.

2. A quote about how awesome it is to have so many friends and to be so popular.

And then, about 18 months ago, I started travelling with Twitter. I headed off on assignments without planning a thing. I began in Paris, where I arrived at the Gare du Nord and began slinging questions into the ether. For 48 hours the people of Twitter guided me around the city, from backstreet art galleries in obscure eastern suburbs to glorious belle époque eating halls in Montmartre. Every tip was tailored to my exact time and location.

In other words, you've got people. (As of this writing, the Guardian writer, Benji Lanyado, has 4,863 followers on Twitter.) And, as someone with a prominent platform, you presumably get a lot of re-Tweets and forwarded information. You're able to spread the word quickly, and get a wide range of responses precisely because of who you are and what you do; people want in on your experiment. That's all fine and good; I have no problems with that. But I have a big problem with suggesting that it'll be like this for everyone, that it's Just So Easy to do this, that everyone can do it: just ask the question and you'll get tips "tailored to [your] exact time and location." It doesn't work like that. Most people are still better off with a guidebook (or using Trip Advisor or online resources).

The steps to a pleasant trip are NOT simply:

Buy an iPhone.
Set up Twitter account.
Broadcast that you're going somewhere and need tips.
Get tailored tips; meet locals; eat well; find enlightenment; live happily ever after.

3. A quote showing some ignorance about the purpose of guidebooks

When I got home, I was a guidebook refusenik. They offered me nothing beyond the decently concise history section.

Uh-huh. And how about the section on the culture in general? On tipping? Or safety? Packing for the climate? Etiquette and taboos? Appropriate attire? Politics? Transportation? Visas? The curatorial role of the guidebook writer goes beyond stay-here-eat-there, and there are plenty of times when you can't rely on your Twitter followers to bail you out, even if you have access to them ("Tweeps: Got 10 cops shakin me down. :( Need tips plz ASAP. How much 2 bribe?") These are areas where I specifically don't advise willful ignorance and where a guidebook--or internet research or a chat with a local--can be invaluable.

The best travel guides serendipity and common sense. Twitter and Facebook and their online peers are fine as supplements to these, but not as substitutes.

Oh, and when you're in a forest or remote area or even the Metro in Paris, good luck with getting a signal. Don't panic if you don't. Enjoy it instead.

What do you think? Are guidebooks doomed? Is Twitter better?

If you're interested in more takes on the future of travel guides in the internet era, World Hum has a nice round-up of articles here.

Remoteness as tourist attraction

2010-10-04T19:35:00.003-05:00

The beaten path can lead to some unexpected places. Sometimes, the very remoteness or other-ness of a place is precisely what draws the masses. Like all the people who tailgated Elizabeth Gilbert's bliss-quest all the way to Bali, in search of peace and quiet and enlightenment, only to find . . . lots of other people in search of same. Or there's the most remote mainland* pub in Britain, where a fair amount of people go precisely because it's . . . the most remote pub in Scotland. "Getting there is half the fun," says the pub, The Old Forge, on its web site. Seventeen miles by foot or seven by boat.

And now it's for sale. You, too, can own this oft-visited symbol of the road less traveled. From The Guardian (via World Hum):

From hikers to yachties to locals, anyone who has ever been to the Old Forge will tell you it's a special place. It's not just the food, from its Skye crab to its haggis lasagne, that's fantastic; it's not just the fact that its local ales, such as Red Cuillin, go down a treat after a day out on some of west coast's finest peaks; nor is it just the ravishing view out across the bay at dusk, to those giant knuckles of rock encircling the still waters. No: it's the whole party spirit that seems to affect the place as the sun goes down.

... It's on sale for offers over £790,000 but cash alone won't guarantee a sale. "We won't be selling to anyone who won't keep its spirit alive," says Jackie. "All the interested parties have been customers. They understand the culture of the place: good food, good music, good people."

-----
* Note the qualifier here: most remote mainland pub. My quick Googling doesn't turn up details of the most remote British pub, period--nor, surprisingly, can I find (again, quickly) many details about the world's most remote bars, aside from this one in Australia. (I did, however, find this round-up of remote hotels.) There's also the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (RIP, Douglas Adams), but that is another matter entirely. Anyway, I'd bet that most of these bars (a) attract some odd, interesting people, both patrons and proprietors, (b) have some interesting reasons for existing, e.g. they used to be on some common route or part of a now-abandoned town. Given the the lack of details readily available, I think someone should write a book. Ahem. Hey, Lee . . .

Keeping a low profile in Europe: deja vu all over again

2010-10-03T17:31:00.002-05:00

Sigh. This is one thing I'd really rather not be timely about.

A few days ago, I mentioned some travel advice from 1954 that felt all too current:

Girson's advice to travelers should also feel familiar, every bit as timely and spot-on for today's world. Don't be held back by your fears and the headlines. Go anyway. But be smart about it. A traveler can go pretty much anywhere, "providing she uses her head and doesn't try to be a smart aleck."

And now, today, there's this (via NPR):

U.S. Alerts American Travelers In Europe

The Obama administration on Sunday warned Americans of potential terrorist threats in Europe and urged them to be vigilant in public places, including tourist spots and transportation hubs.

A State Department travel alert advises U.S. citizens living or traveling in Europe to take more precautions about their personal security. The alert is one step below a formal travel warning advising Americans not to visit Europe.

Finding the new on the beaten path (it's easier than you think)

2010-10-01T10:45:00.006-05:00

“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.' ” -- Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image

I know, I know. I've already said I'm done with the whole "traveler" vs. "tourist" thing. But as I went back through my notes from The Tourist, I rediscovered the Boorstin quote at the top of this post, and I was struck that this is a common sentiment: proper travel is active, while shallow/inferior/cliched travel is passive.

I'll put aside for the moment the fact that passive travel has its place, that cruises and Disney World and time-shares provide a much-needed, all-inclusive escape for so many over-worked people who want to use their hard-earned two weeks of vacation time on some rejuvenation. Another post.

What interests me most, at the moment, is that if you go by the active/passive definition, then the destination is irrelevant. If mindset is all that matters, you can go to Disney World as a traveler and to the most remote parts of the globe as a tourist.

In Berlin, Lee and I took a walking tour of the city. It started at a Starbucks by the Brandenburg Gate. As we waited for the tour to begin, we watched street performers and trinket-hawkers do their thing, as you'll see anywhere on the tourist trail. Our tour group was mostly backpackers in their twenties (like us), and I'll confess to expecting, almost hoping for, some stereotypical stoner-hippie-"I'm not a tourist" types. It would have made hilarious fodder for the book.

I came up empty. Everyone was inquisitive and engaged, peppering our guide with questions and genuinely interested in the landmarks and history.

In the most fundamental sense, we were sightseers, surveying the landmarks of the city in whirlwind fashion and taking absurd amounts of photos. I even did the tourist thing and got my passport stamped at Checkpoint Charlie. ... But I did that because I wanted to talk to the guy selling the stamps. He was wearing an American military uniform from World War II, but I had a pretty good hunch he wasn't American or, for that matter, originally from Germany. I figured he had some interesting stories, maybe even some insights into tourists or tourism or the Berlin's split personality of both commemoration and commercialization. ("I'm from here, of course," he said, taking offense when I asked where he was from. "Right, sorry!" I replied. A few minutes later, he added, proudly, "I've been here six years!")

I can't help but think--and perhaps this is a bit of smugness creeping in, but I hope not--that we were, in fact, more actively aware of where we were (geographically, culturally, historically, and otherwise) than people who go on a package tour of Antarctica or see Thailand as a never-ending party fueled by mystery booze and banana pancakes.

In every city, Lee and I wandered until we got lost and then we wandered some more. We asked locals for directions. We chatted with souvenir vendors and bartenders and others who saw the tourist experience from the other side. We stopped to read the historical markers. Granted, we weren't settling down for a year or even weeks. Ours was a whirlwind tour. We didn't meet a lot of the Authentic, Eccentric Locals (TM) who populate so many travel memoirs. But we did our best to get a sense of the culture and the city in the short time we were there. We were tourists, no doubt, but we were active, always searching for what was beneath the surface. Does that make us "travelers"? Are the pursuits of pleasure and adventure mutually exclusive? To the latter question, at least, I'd say no.

Lee and I weren't outliers. As we saw on that walking tour of Berlin, plenty of "tourists" are active. Plenty of them are there precisely because the beaten path is full of stories. (I've said it before: avoiding somewhere just because there are lots of people there is just as absurd as going somewhere because other people are.) Many tourists--not all, but a whole lot of 'em--are pretty damn interesting. Case in point: Jian from Malaysia, who was also on our Berlin tour. He was taking the long way home after getting his degree in England, and for him the Grand Tour was the fulfillment of a dream. He'd put in extra hours at his job as a waiter in London to save up for it. Or there was Sally, an American law school student also on that tour, who told me about all the books I should read about Berlin's history. Shall I go on? Point made?

There are plenty of stories to tell on the beaten path. You might need to put in some extra effort to find them, but they're there, if you're willing to ask around and talk to people. People have stories; places have stories. To take a walking tour of Berlin--and then to keep exploring the city on your own--is to see living history. To take in the sights of Rome--assuming you do your reading and ask your questions--is to learn why this stuff is important and cool, to understand the very good reasons why this path is so beaten. It may not be more active in the physical sense than, say, meditating in a hermit hut or climbing a mountain, but I bet it tells you more about history and (a specific) culture.

The point is this: if travel is all about the journey, not the destination, as the aphorism has it, then we have to concede that the beaten path can be every bit as interesting as the road less traveled, that in the midst of the ostensibly tacky environs of so-called tourist traps, we can find the new, the foreign, the surprising, the delightful.

Another aphorism: life is what you make it. The joy of travel is sometimes hiding in plain sight. Find it.

Quote of the day: Americans abroad in a time of tumult

2010-09-29T07:22:00.001-05:00

Here's a fun game. Below is a quote from a travel guide chapter on the importance of keeping a low profile abroad. Guess the year.

In the years past newspapers have headlined anti-American demonstrations in Tokyo, Lima, La Paz, Pnompenh [sic]; Algerian riots in Paris; fighting by Greeks and Turks over Cyprus; border raids between Syrians and Israelis.

That's from Rochelle Girson's Maiden Voyages: A Lively Guide for the Woman Traveller. Published in ... 1954.

Girson's advice to travelers should also feel familiar, every bit as timely and spot-on for today's world. Don't be held back by your fears and the headlines. Go anyway. But be smart about it. A traveler can go pretty much anywhere, "providing she uses her head and doesn't try to be a smart aleck."

Other timeless advice and observations:

"Keep smiling."
Use "discretion and tact."
"The most important things ... that any woman can take with her abroad are an open mind and restraint. Astonishing as it may seem to us, a considerable portion of the world--and not only the Communist-oriented--regards America as an imperialist power."

Happy World Tourism Day!

2010-09-27T16:48:00.000-05:00

No, seriously.

To celebrate, go take several dozen photos of a nearby landmark and refer to yourself as a "traveler."

What do YOU think: Has travel gotten safer for women?

2010-09-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

Help me out, won't you? I'm looking for some comments from women who have backpacked in Europe in the last few years.

If you're new here (welcome) here's what the project documented on this blog is all about: last summer, I traveled around Europe using both a 1963 edition of Europe On Five Dollars a Day and copies of my mother's letters from her Grand Tour in '67. I was looking at How Things Have Changed (Or Haven't) on the backpacker trail since that time. Now I'm working on a book about the experience (forthcoming from Perigee, Spring 2012).

One of the things that Mom talked about--at length--was sleazy, sketchy, grabby Italian men. She encountered them all over the continent, not just in Italy. I've included one of her letters below. (I should note that she also met one or two totally wholesome Italian men, but they were, sad to say, the exception.)

Here's the thing: I'm not female. It's kind of hard, then, for me to say whether or not this has changed--or, for that matter, if Europe has become a safer, more comfortable place for women travelers (solo or otherwise) in other ways. Maybe everything is different. Maybe it's the same as ever. I realize that my Y chromosome makes it rather difficult for me to know for sure, no matter how much I tried to be aware of the goings-on around me.

From conversations with my fellow travelers--and reading various travel blogs--I got the impression that, yes, things have changed, at least to a large degree. Travel is safer; scumbags are fewer. Elizabeth Gilbert echoed this sentiment in Eat, Pray, Love (also quoted below) But I'd like to hear more thoughts, more stories, if anyone would be willing to share. I'm genuinely curious to know what's changed; it's an important piece of the then-and-now comparison of the book, but one that I really can't fill in based on my own experiences.

I'd also love to hear any other thoughts on the specific topic of being a female traveler in Europe in the twenty-first century (or, for that matter, in any era).

So. I'd really appreciate any stories, observations, or insight anyone would care to share. It'll help make for a better (and more accurate) book. If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts, please comment below or, better yet, e-mail me at doug@douglasmack.net. And, of course, I'll only quote you with permission. Thanks in advance!

And now, here's what Mom had to say in one of her letters (and I should note that this story is just one of many):

Dear Bob,

Do you know why Italian men are so awful? Because they start very young. Tonight we had a hysterically funny experience. We walked to the train station to find out what time our train leaves tomorrow. On the way back we were “blessed” with the escort of 4 young men—whose ages we estimate to have averaged 15 (at the very oldest) . . . At one point there were also 2 soldiers (Italiano) and one other guy, but they left 2/3 of the way back here. Bob, these kids ended up walking us home from the station—which is about a mile—all the way Ann and I spoke French to each other and these little boys were trying to address us in various languages—French, Italian, English, and German. Poor kids—we really frustrated their attempts to communicate. Ever been told “I love you” in 3 diff. languages by a 14-year-old? I hope you appreciate the humor of the situation, for Ann and I are still laughing. When we got to our pensione, Ann invited them up to meet our father, an invitation which they declined.

Italian men are very ‘attentive.’ One just came over—ugh. . . . I cannot wait to see YOU.

Here's what Elizabeth Gilbert had to say on the same subject in Eat, Pray, Love:

I ask around, 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. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a society that this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable.

So. Thoughts? Really, seriously: I appreciate any comments anyone cares to offer. This book will be a lot better for it.

Quote of the day: information overloaded in 1844

2010-09-25T17:31:00.001-05:00

"There is, probably, not a famous picture or statue in all Italy, but could not easily be buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to dissertations on it."

-- Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy

Click here for the full book on Google Books.

Here be cheese-eaters

2010-09-24T09:11:00.000-05:00

European stereotypes, mapped.

Not-so-coincidentally, this is also basically the Grand Tourist's map of Europe (although I'd change Italy to "Godfathers and pizza").

via @myessis

Do guidebooks create the beaten path?

2010-09-21T12:14:00.004-05:00

I have a recent edition of Rick Steves Europe Through the Back Door. Here's what it says on the back cover: “Avoid crowds and tourist traps . . . Discover off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”

But as anyone who has followed the insider knowledge of such guidebooks can attest, by the time you get to one of these hidden gems, you'll find a dozen other tourists already there, each one bearing your same guidebook and the glum expression that says, "This is not what I was promised."

You know that famous Yogi Berra line, "No one goes there; it's too crowded"? With guidebooks, we get just the opposite phenomenon: everyone goes there because it's not crowded.

This is nothing new. A 1963 profile of Arthur Frommer in Time included the following anecdote:

Last week in Paris one proud hotelier told Frommer: "It is your book which bought this elevator." But the new lift meant higher rentals, and Frommer sadly made a note to drop the hotel from the next edition.

Or there's this, from the 1966 edition of Let's Go: The Student Guide to Europe (and which serves as a reminder that the snarkiness of youth is timeless):

In the low-cost field the most popular guide is Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day, which has become so widely circulated among American tourists that you will generally find them sitting on top of each other in the hotels and restaurants recommended.

The most telling example of a guidebook's impact on a place is, I think, one that involves Frommer's rival Temple Fielding, he of the raffia basket carry-on and the portable record players and the mink-covered beer can opener. Such was the impact of his guidebook that, according to John McPhee's 1968 New Yorker profile, "A waiter's strike in Italy was postponed when leaders of the national waters' union were informed that Fielding was in the country."

The guidebook effect extends way off the beaten path, too. In Getting Stoned With Savages, J. Maarten Troost travels to the South Pacific island of Malekula, where he meets a man while walking through the forest:

"I am George," he said curtly. "Do you have a Lonely Planet?"

I did indeed have a Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu. We had brought it out from the U.S. Remarkably, they had a chapter on Malekula, which I had read thoroughly, highlighting all the references--and there were many--to the dangers posed by sharks.

"Turn to page one-fourteen," he said. "Do you see?" He jabbed at the page. "That's me."

The entry to which he referred read, in its entirety: "In the village on Wala Island, George's Guestroom is small, for one or two people."

And have you read Eat, Pray, Love? Don't lie. You're reading a travel blog. I'm just going to guess, then, that you've either read or intentionally avoided Elizabeth Gilbert's gazillion-copy-selling spiritual self-help tract masquerading as travel writing. Just a hunch.

Anyway. So she goes to Bali. To (proper-noun) Love. But she's not quite done with the praying and the physical health stuff, either. Gilbert befriends a healer named Wayan, and decides to help her out--in part so that Wayan can reach that eternal goal of the tourist-area business owner: a listing in a prominent guidebook.

If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print.

As it turns out, Lonely Planet was not the book that really put Wayan on the tourist trail. That, of course, fell to . . . Eat, Pray, Love. From Time last month:

Wayan, an outspoken Indonesian healer of dark beauty and another of Eat, Pray, Love's personalities, was, with her young daughter and two adopted orphans, once on the verge of eviction. Now a staff of well-built men churns out her healthful Vitamin Lunches for calling travelers. From January to March of 2006, 237,260 foreign tourists stopped by Bali. Since then the number has swelled steadily, and in the same three months of this year, there were 551,186 visitors to the island.

While precise figures are not yet available, industry observers from the Denpasar Tourism Academy have confirmed that the island has been repopulated by tourists looking to develop their spirituality. . . . "It's a thing we want to promote because those activities bring peace to mind," says Nyoman Suwidjana, deputy chairman of the Bali Tourism Board. "And Bali loves peace."

Emphasis mine. Just in case you missed the irony.

Eat, pray ... No, just EAT.

2010-09-17T16:28:00.001-05:00

As is apparent from the existence of this blog and this project, I'm a fan of quirky travel quests. But I don't think I've ever been on one so monumental, so crucial to science, so important to the advancement of culture and possibly even world peace ... than the one I recently completed with my friends Teague and Alex.

I speak, of course, of Doughnut Quest 2010.

Three men. Three boroughs. Three days. Ten bakeries. Twenty-five doughnuts. One delicious, gut-busting attempt to find the best doughnuts in New York City.

Teague has the official, analytical, chart-filled write-up over at his blog. (You thought I was kidding about this being scientific? Please. When it comes to pastries, we do not mess around.)

Take it away, Teague.

Above: Alex takes the ceremonial first bite of the first doughnut.

Let the eating begin!

Quote of the day: travel as conspicuous consumption

2010-09-10T20:56:00.000-05:00

"By the 1970s, social trends were again altering the nature of comparative consumption. Most obvious was the entrance of large numbers of married women into the labor force. As the workplace replaced the coffee klatch and the backyard barbecue as locations of social contact, workplace conversation became a source of information on who went where for vacation, who was having a deck put on the house, and whether the kids were going to dance class, summer camp, or karate lessons." [emphasis mine]

-- Juliet Schor, The Overspent American

Little Virtual Mermaid

2010-08-29T08:46:00.006-05:00

Is it still a tourist landmark if the landmark isn't there? Yes!

A friend of mine is living in Copenhagen. From a recent report on his blog:

This morning, we had an excellent, traditional Danish breakfast consisting of bread and things to put on bread. It's such a good culinary concept. Then, G drove me and E2 into Copenhagen. We saw where the famous Little Mermaid statue is usually. Unfortunately , it's on loan to China for the time being. In its place was a large television screen displaying a still photo of the statue. Hilarious.

This is a totally unoriginal thought, but here goes: we don't go to tourist landmarks because they are inherently interesting per se. We go because everyone else has gone. We go because the it occupies some greater status in culture and history--it's not a statue or a building but a Landmark, a gathering place, a site that is, like a celebrity, famous for being famous.

In this case, though, I think the television screen is probably more interesting than the statue it's temporarily replacing (if you're easily amused by irony and disappointment, that is). After all, to take a photo of the real deal is to capture what is probably the least-flattering of all not-so-flattering photos:

The criminals in Paris are actually kind of charming

2010-08-17T21:50:00.002-05:00

I'm writing the Paris chapter, and I had to cut this scene. So here ya go: an outtake!

E5D is not an all-purpose guidebook. It doesn't have tips on avoiding lines or how to dress in various cultures or how to keep in touch with the folks back home. It also has no advice on avoiding that eternal anxiety of travel, street crime.

So when a guy near the Eiffel Tower tried to scam me, I made me an easy mark. Luckily, I had found the single most inept criminal in history.

There are a lot of scams that modern guidebooks warn you about, many involving methods of distracting you while an accomplice picks your pocket (watch out for someone “accidentally” spilling something on you) or trying to give you a great price on goods that are, of course, counterfeit.

Here's how the one that I saw works, in theory: as you walk down the sidewalk, someone a few steps behind you tries to get your attention. He's holding a gold ring or other small, potentially expensive object. “You dropped this,” he says (most likely in English). You tell him that, no, you didn't. He looks at it, as if for the first time, and is stunned—stunned!—to find a marking labeling it as pure gold or otherwise authentic-and-pricey. Then the benevolent soul tries to sell you this prestigious item for a price so low that you really can't afford to pass up the opportunity. He refuses to take no for an answer, badgering you until you give him some cash to go away.

And here's how this guy did it: as I was about ten feet away, walking toward him, he conspicuously dropped a ring on the ground. He looked up at me for a split second, nonchalantly—just lookin' around, being a normal person—then whipped his gaze back toward the sidewalk, gesturing theatrically, jaw dropping to his knees. He pointed. Mon dieu! What have we here?

“Excusez-moi?” he said shyly, looking at me again. “You have dropped zee ring, monsieur?”

“Nope. Merci,” I said, trying not to laugh in his face.

“No, no. You … have dropped ... eet.” There were odd pauses in his wording, as though he couldn't recall his script. “I have seen! I am … helping you. Oui?”

“Non.”

“Ah. Okay. You would like … to buy? How much … will you pay? You make an offer.”

“No, really. Not interested.”

“Non?” I waited for the hard sell, but he offered only a look of confusion, searching his mind for the follow-up line but coming up blank.

“Oh. Okay,” he sighed, and walked away.

Quote of the Day: The American Dream in three objects: the pill, the card, the book

2010-08-02T06:03:00.000-05:00

"It's no accident that Arthur Frommer, the Pill, and credit cards are simultaneous phenomena. Everybody deserves everything. You only live once. Screwing for everybody and Europe for everybody too. This is the egalitarian key to a proper understanding of Europe on Five Dollars a Day."

-- Stanley Elkin, “The World On $5 a Day.” Harper's Magazine, July 1972.

Chef Boyardee and the meaning of authentic cuisine

2010-07-27T07:31:00.022-05:00

One evening in Florence, I had some bold journalistic investigations to undertake. I needed to eat pizza.

Before we go on, please take a good look at these Life magazine ads from 1956:

"Your first taste of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Ravioli lets you know this is the true Italian dish."

"That's the way they serve pizza in Amalfi!"

In 1944, a New York Times article about a just-opened pizzeria led with this description of the exotic foodstuff: “One of the most popular dishes in southern Italy, especially in the vicinity of Naples, is pizza—a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes. Cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and so on may be used.” Gosh, sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?

Twenty years after that rather detached, straightforward description appeared, pizza was so commonplace that in the menu phrasebook section of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Arthur Frommer offers not a translation but a wiseacre wink: “You know this one.”

Now, another fifty years on, I settled myself into a corner table at one of Arthur’s recommended restaurants—he claimed, “no surprises; no cover,” but surprise, Arthur, there was a two-euro cover—and ordered my own “pie made from a yeast dough” to see how it measured up. It was good enough, with the crust slightly charred from the wood-fired oven and the slight saltiness of the prosciutto perfectly balancing with the creamy mozzarella and the earthy depth of the funghi.

But here’s what struck me: it wasn’t as good—or as authentic—as the pizza I can get at either of two different restaurants in my neighborhood back home in Minneapolis. With their imported San Marzano tomatoes, artisanal toppings, mozzarella di bufala, and sea salt-dusted crusts, these are marketed as paragons of the authentic Italian cuisine. One restaurant is a member of Vera Pizza Napoletana, the official and famously strict arbiter of true Neapolitan pizza. Even the decor and menu design of those pizzerias back home are superficially more authentic, more Old World Italian than the restaurants I visited in Florence.

Today, some of Arthur’s and my mother’s comments about Italian foods seem nearly as naive and wide-eyed as that 1944 Times article. Arthur lists fettuccine and risotto in the vegetable section, for example; most Americans today would probably not just recategorize them but smirk at the accurate-but-not-entirely translations of these as “noodles” and “rice,” of gelato as merely “ice cream,” and of prosciutto as simply “ham.” Mom explained the concept of a trattoria to my father in one of her letters and waxed rhapsodic about a particularly exotic dish that I immediately recognized, having seen it on multiple restaurant menus back home, as saltimbocca.

Though Arthur and my mother undoubtedly had their own preconceptions of Europe, based on photographs, books, and previous tourists’ tales, the information available to them before their trips was paltry compared to what today’s information-overloaded travelers have at their disposal. Mom didn’t have a hundred different guidebooks and a thousand different web sites telling her what to expect. Italian food hadn’t become so commonplace as to be cliché, as evidenced by Wendy’s recent short-lived line of sandwiches marketed under the Italian-by-way-of-focus-group name Frescata or, most of all, Fancy Feast's gourmet cat foods, which include both Florentine and Tuscany lines, apparently intended for the sophisticated, citizen-of-the-world felines: “Romance your cat's taste buds with Fancy Feast Tuscany wet cat food recipes. Tuscany recipes are accented with long grain rice and garden greens.”

The fact is, in any given urban area in the United States today, you can easily find food that is more authentically Italian than that found in most cafes in tourist areas of Italy. That wasn’t at all true in 1960s America, where “Italian” basically meant cheap wine and gummy spaghetti, or the previously-mentioned Chef Boyardee. Most travelers of that era likely had not experienced even the watered-down, theme park version of Italian cuisine presented, today, by the likes of Buca di Beppo and The Olive Garden. Their expectations of Italian cuisine in Italy—of Italian culture in general—were not the same, not as high, as modern tourists'. Mom and Frommer and their peers couldn’t presume to believe they knew exactly what to expect, which was probably for the better. They didn't expect their pizza to taste a certain way; they weren't measuring the tourist cafe against the better Italian food back home.

Put another way--and this applies to more than just food--back then they were ignorant; today we’re delusional.

One more 1956 Chef Boyardee ad for you:

"Chef is the one spaghetti this side of the ocean that makes a special point of following old-country traditions."

Bonjour, new readers

2010-07-24T00:17:00.000-05:00

Hello, new readers who got here from World Hum, Kempt, and Wandering Italy. Thanks for stopping by (and thanks to those fine web sites for linking to my "the things we no longer carry" post; Temple Fielding was an interesting man ...).

More retro-themed programming coming soon. I'll be posting about changes in food, for example, this coming Tuesday. Teaser:

While you're here, please take a moment to read some other posts. Start with the FAQ (and Frequently Sarcastic Answers) to learn what this blog is all about, and then check out the "essentials" section for some of my favorite posts.

Basically, this is a blog about the beaten path and how it got so beaten. Expect commentary on travel, tourism, and the chocolate croissants. This is not a place to find tips about how to avoid tourist traps. You can find those on every other travel blog. This IS where you'll find a unique perspective on the cliched tourist experience. Like these not-so-flattering photos of famous landmarks, for example.

A'ight? Okay, then.

Comments/complaints/compliments/croissant tips? Send 'em to doug@douglasmack.net. And thanks.

Quote of the day: the cure for loneliness on the road

2010-07-23T08:07:00.000-05:00

"And what if I became manic-depressive through an acute sense of isolation? Oh well, I comforted myself, I have resources: I talk to myself."

-- Rochelle Girson, Maiden Voyages: A Lively Guide for the Woman Traveler (1954)

A single moment of air traffic: 1956 vs. 2010

2010-07-20T08:44:00.000-05:00

Air traffic over the Atlantic at a single moment in 1956 (4:00 a.m. GMT, May 6).

[Accompanying text reprinted at the end of this post.]

I couldn't a comparable recent graphic, but I did find this 2008 video showing all global air traffic in a single day. (So for a direct comparison, you could pause the video to generate a "single moment"; I believe 4 a.m. GMT would be right at the start, actually.)

And here's all the air traffic over the U.S. (and slightly beyond) at about 4:30 a.m. GMT on July 18, 2010.

The top image is from Life magazine, June 18, 1956. The text below the graphic says:

The extraordinary future of international air travel is best foretold in the busy pattern of the present. The map above shows air activity during a single actual moment in the air over the Atlantic--a quiet moment, darkened by night. it is 4 a.m. on May 6, 1956 in London, 11 p.m. of the evening before across the ocean in New York. But though the scene is far from human habitation, the air is filled with the roar of big planes, and with the disembodied voices of pilots, radio operators and traffic controllers exchanging information.

There are 110 planes engaged at this moment in flying over the ocean. Of them 39 are military aircraft on regular training missions or engaged in carrying personnel and cargo to and from overseas bases. One is an oil company plane headed from New York to Amsterdam. The remaining 70 are transport planes belonging to 18 airlines engaged in flying passengers and cargo regularly across the Atlantic. Aboard them are 3,295 passengers and crew.

Two facts about the chart show how much of the air age is an American achievement. Every plane shown here was made in the U.S.--by Douglas, Lockheed, Boeing. And U.S. airlines are operate almost as many of the commercial planes (34) as as carriers from all other nations put together.

These lanes over the Atlantic are the busiest in the international air. But at this moment other lines operating out of the U.S. and Europe are sending planes on around the globe in opposite directions to meet in distant places and bind the world in a careful meeting of flight schedules.

Quote of the day: Arthur on the similarities of tourists

2010-07-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

From a Money magazine interview with Arthur Frommer in April 1979:

Q: Do foreigners still think that Americans are obnoxious tourists?

A: Cartoons in foreign newspapers used to depict American tourists in loud sports jackets with cameras around their necks. That has changed, possibly because these days you see German tourists, for example, in lederhosen, wandering through Rockefeller Center with cameras dangling from their necks. Tourists are tourists regardless of their national origins. They are bewildered by their encounter with a new culture. They are not only unduly sensitive to acts of discourtesy but also ridiculously grateful for simple acts of kindness.

(emphasis mine)

Click here for my post on the subject: Going Native in the Tourist Culture.

Don't go there

2010-07-16T17:51:00.006-05:00

I. Must. Read. This. Book.

More info.

Also, The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog, in an interview with author Catherine Price, claims that there's "a trend in anti-travel books" like this one. Uh-oh. Pleasepleaseplease don't let this peak before Spring 2012. My release date suddenly seems waaay too far off.

[UPDATE: Book Bench cites only two examples of this trend: (1) Doug Lansky's The Titanic Awards (published by Perigee, as my book will be!) and (2) this May 2010 article in the New York Times, the lead paragraph of which does indeed say that this season’s most interesting travel books have gone into staycation mode. But when you read the article, this turns out to be 100 percent false. The books are indeed about people who stay in one place--but in every case, it's an exotic place to which they've moved. By that definition, staycation lit includes A Year in Provence and Driving Over Lemons and Under the Tuscan Sun and A Moveable Feast. This sort of book is nothing new, I promise, even if you're desperate to find the timely angle. Note to the New York Times: if you go to a far-off locale, if you journey away from the place that you call home, that is by definition not a staycation. ... In other words, I don't think we have a trend. Yet. I hope.]

The things we no longer carry (portable record player, anyone?)

2010-07-15T07:49:00.010-05:00

Temple Fielding wrote the guidebook that Arthur Frommer loved to mock, Fielding's Travel Guide to Europe. "It maps out ... the short, quick road to insolvency that most American tourists have been traveling for years," Arthur wrote.

In 1968, eleven years after the first edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day--and a year after my mother toured the continent with that same budget-oriented guidebook--John McPhee profiled Temple Fielding in The New Yorker. After Fielding's first book came out in 1946, McPhee, writes, he "was soon operating virtually without competition as councellor to the millions of American tourists who have traversed Europe in the postwar years, and his closest competitors became, as they have remained, scarcely visible behind him."

I don't have numbers to back me up, but I strongly suspect that this is a case of The New Yorker's stereotypically myopic, upper crust worldview getting the best of it, this being the magazine that was, famously, “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” There's only a cursory mention of E5D and Arthur Frommer in the profile, in this dismissal: "Fielding does not think much of Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day. 'We don't respect Frommer,' he told me in an even, sad voice." But even though neither McPhee nor Fielding get any deeper into the subject, E5D was gaining ground rapidly was already a cultural touchstone by this point; it's telling that Fielding came out with his own Super-Economy Guide to Europe in 1967. E5D already was the go-to book for the younger, more frugal set (like my mother). The first run of the original edition of the book was 5,000, and according to Arthur, "it no sooner reached the bookstores than it absolutely disappeared." In Mom's letters, she mentioned Fodor's guidebook and Europe on Five Dollars a Day. Not a word about Fielding's.

The most telling difference between Fielding and Frommer, to my mind, is not in the places they recommend staying or eating (although the contrasts there are indeed profound) but in how they packed, the things they carried:

Temple Fielding's packing list (from McPhee's profile):

The [large raffia] basket and its standard contents go with fielding around Western Europe on all his annual trips, which ordinarily last for five interrupted months. In it Fielding keeps a bottle of maraschino cherries, a bottle of Angostura biters, a portable Philips three-speed record-player, five records (four of mood music and "one Sinatra always"), a leather-covered RCA transistor radio, an old half-pint Heublein bottle full of vermouth, and a large nickel thermos with a wide mouth.

... Fielding also carries a large calfskin briefcase that was designed by him (it is full of compartments) and was made by Loewe, a Spanish purveyor of stunningly fine leather goods. The forty-one items inside the briefcase are standard on all his travels. [These include] his sterling-silver paper stapler (by Tiffany), his plastic fork, his plastic spoon, his stud box, his dwarf American cigars, his standard toothbrush, his collapsible toothbrush, his rubber bands, his paper clips, his eraser, his credit cards, his peanuts, his two-inch bottles of Johnnie Walker ... his Fernet-Branca ... his working notebook ... his ink, his Scotch Tape, his ballpoint-pen refills, his undercover notebook for surreptitious notes ... his alarm wristwatch, his Buech-Girod alarm clock ("It's the world's smallest; it yodels") ...

Fielding uses two suitcases, and in them he packs thirty-five handkerchiefs (all of hand-rolled Swiss linen and all bearing his signature, hand-embroidered), ten shirts, ten ties, ten pairs of undershorts, three pairs of silk pajamas, eight pairs of socks, evening clothes, three pairs of shoes, a lounging robe, a pair of sealskin slippers, and two toilet kits. ... He wears one suit and carries two.

Okay, this list goes on. There's also a spinning top. And a mink-covered beer-can opener. You get the idea--the idea being that, goodness, (a) that's way too much, and (b), that sounds like the packing list of a Bond villain. Five bucks says Fielding knew how to use each of those items as a lethal weapon.

And here's Arthur, or rather, his wife, Hope, who wrote the "Packing to Save Money" chapter:

The tourist who carries heavy luggage and a complete wardrobe to Europe spends a great deal of money unnecessarily. ... A light suitcase means freedom. ... If you make the right decision, you'll do the following when it comes time to pack. You'll first buy the lightest suitcase available. You'll then fill it with the skimpiest set of clothing your courage will allow. Having done that, you'll then remove half these clothes from the suitcase, and depart on your Europe trip.

For men, this is Hope's packing recommended packing list:

3 pairs of shorts (dacron or nylon)

3 cotton T-shirts

3 pairs of socks (at least one pair should be nylon)

2 handkerchiefs [recall that Fielding packed 35]

1 sweater

2 Wash 'n Wear Drip-Dry sport shirts

1 Drip-Dry white dress shirt

1 pair dress shoes

1 pair canvas shoes

1 light bathrobe

2 pair of nylon or dacron pajamas

1 tweed sports jacket

1 pair of heavy slacks

1 pair of chino slacks

1 summer suit

1 raincoat

2 neckties

1 bathing suit

toilet and shaving articles (adapted for European use, if electric)

Don't take another thing!

Of course, to the modern reader, this still seems like an absurdly long list. Two suits? A bathrobe? Even if you take care to be a bit more formal than the average tourist, you're still probably packing fewer garments and of lighter material.

One final, amusing thing to note: Hope also suggests that you "roll into scroll-like shapes whatever is rollable: underwear, slips, bras, and so forth--all the things that don't have to be wrinkle-free. In that manner, these items can be placed along the sides of your suitcase easily, or into the most unusual cracks and crevices (you'll discover plenty of them while packing)."

Does that sound at all familiar? If you travel at all or read any travel-related web sites or publications, you've probably heard this before, always presented as a modern innovation. A mere two months ago, the New York Times breathlessly reported that "many flight attendants roll their clothes rather than fold them to save space."

Yeah, well. E5D got there first. Again.

For more on packing, innovative or otherwise, check out these past posts:

What's in my backpack?
The burdens of baggage

The art and joy of random riffs and references

2010-07-04T11:21:00.002-05:00

One of the joys and frustrations (in equal measure) of working on a research-intensive writing project is that your brain becomes wired to look for connections and associations everywhere. Several times a day, I'll be reading a random newspaper article, magazine article, or blog post--purely for pleasure, not for research--and I'll suddenly stop and think, Wow, that's a great point about the World Cup/Sartre/local noise ordinances/the Fourth of July/pistachios/font design/NASA! I should work that into my book!

[NOTE: This became an essay about the artistry of piecing together connections, and my own struggles with same. I suspect that most of my readers don't actually care to read 700 soul-searching words on the subject, so I've moved that section to a footnote at the bottom of the post, after the jump.]

About two-thirds of the time, I think for three seconds and realize, no, it would be completely ridiculous to quote this. Dude: Smurfs do not tell us anything about Paris or Parisians. And wherever you were going with that, it was probably offensive. But a third of the time, I write it down in hopes that, yeah, maybe I can do something with that. A few recent examples (sans my commentary on how it relates to tourism/travel/travel writing; I'll let you guess):

1. From this Associated Press story about travel in South Africa during the World Cup:

Like any worthy pilgrimage, the World Cup throws unlikely souls together and generates deeper understanding if not always deep conversations.

2. From Tad Friend's profile of Steve Carell in the current issue of The New Yorker:

Modern entertainment increasingly strives for an orchestrated spontaneity. Even as scripted comedy tries to seem unscripted, reality shows such as "Wife Swap," "The Hills," and "The Real Housewives" have evidently become "soft scripted," with their arcs and conflicts built in. ... Yet they all plan for unplanned moments, engineering scenarios that feel like life minus the boring parts.

3. From Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (which I read when I was about 14, and totally did not understand, aside from the soccer references; now, at 29, I am halfway through again and laughing and crying on every page, mesmerized by--and profoundly jealous of--Hornby's storytelling abilities and artful, insightful connection-making, of which this is just one example):

There is a short story by the American writer Andre Dubus entitled "The Winter Father," about a man whose divorce has separated him from his two children. In the winter his relationship with them is tetchy and strained: they move from afternoon jazz club to cinema to restaurant, and stare at each other. But in the summer, when they can go to the beach, they get on fine. 'The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again.' ... [The story] manages to isolate what is valuable in the relationship between parents and children, and explains simply and precisely why the zoo trips are doomed.

4. From Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story," in his collection of connected short stories, The Things They Carried (probably my favorite book ever, and one I return to whenever I need to be reminded of what powerful, evocative, completely entrancing writing is like):

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. ... The pictures get jumbled, and you miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

---

NOTE-SLASH-BONUS-ESSAY-THAT-IS-NOT-REALLY-ABOUT-TRAVEL-OR-TOURISM

I struggle with the artistry of association. Too many random quotes and tangents can lend a story a Google search quality, burying the message and narrative under a baffling barrage of not-really-related ideas. It becomes unfocused and maddening; it proves to the reader that the author is a good note-taker but a crappy writer, like a jazz improviser trying to riff on ten songs at once but failing to achieve any sense of melody or rhythm, succeeding only in being pretentious and hubristic. At its best, though, those riffs, those associations of seemingly-disparate ideas, can seamlessly build to something beautiful and harmonious, even transcendent, something that becomes not just greater than the sum of its parts but greater, more culture-probing and Big-Idea-creating than the original subject in and of itself, such that the subject becomes a metaphor or stand-in for broader themes. Any book, essay, or story of any merit uses these associations to build its thesis.

It's a tricky balance, made all the more so by the fact that not everyone will understand the references and tangents. When I called Munich's Glockenspiel "Ye Olde Chuck E. Cheese," most Americans of my or my parents' generation presumably got the reference. But you Aussies, Canadians, or Americans over 70? Possibly not.

Should I care if not everyone gets the references, though? I'm not sure. At a writers' conference I attended a few years ago (tangent to build to the bigger point!), the author Junot Diaz talked about his mix of high-minded ideas (philosophy, politics) and lowbrow culture (comic books, street slang) as well as different languages, in his Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He said that he wanted his readers to be disoriented and to not understand all of his references and associations, or even entire conversations in languages they didn't speak. Because life is like that, inherently: you're constantly using your limited knowledge to piece together the story of your surroundings, but you'll never know exactly what's going on.

I think it's a bit different for nonfiction, though: there's less room for artistry; the references need to serve the ideas, not the story. When I read Pico Iyer's The Global Soul, I was forever frustrated by his references to Derek Walcott and other poets, to the point where it became distracting, a showcase of an Oxford education rather than what it was supposed to be: a keen, focused commentary on the nature of home in a global age. In my case, I have all these temptations to work in references from my liberal arts schooling (hail the maize and blue!)--White Noise, Vinyl Leaves, Fast Food Nation, Being There, The Machine in the Garden. Eliade, represent! Eiffel Tower = tourist axis mundi! (Anyone? Holla!) I even have this great theory about how Janice Radway's Reading the Romance--a critical examination of romance novels and, most of all, their readers' motivations for reading them--relates to the escapist fantasies of travel literature like Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, to say nothing of the travel-writing-as-spiritual-self-help phenomenon that is Eat, Pray, Love.

Honestly, though? You probably don't want to read it. Just a hunch. (Also, I do have an editor-mandated word count limit.) This is not an academic treatise; it's a book for a general market, a book that I'd like more than two people to read. Though I may be writing about the confusing, wondrous, strange, alienating nature of travel and tourism, I really can't (or at least don't want to) get away with dropping superfluous quotes and riffs for their own sake, reader confusion be damned.

If any of my references or riffs on this blog go over your head, please speak up.

And for now, in the words of the great poet and philosopher Porky the Pig, That's All, Folks!

The European backpacking experience in one photo

2010-07-04T09:10:00.000-05:00

Discuss.