I’m not on summer break–I’m hard at work. But everyone’s favorite kitchen accessory, Sugar Duck, is on vacation, and he’s having a blast! All these postcards were “delivered” to me by Peter.
[The next morning…]
………..
In other news that makes me feel hung-over, Lonely Planet appears to have been gutted in the name of the new digital era. (Much like, oh, Frommer’s and Zagat–and that worked out so well.) More on that later. Sigh.
I know, last week I gave the master list of counterintuitive travel tips. But, whaddya know, I thought of another one.
And that is: Discomfort is good.
You could say this is a variation on the idea of taking impractical transport. But there’s a greater sense of this, in which it’s generally a good idea to avoid typical luxury, even if you can afford it.
There’s a little treadmill of travel style as you age and get a little more money to play with: you’re meant to go from hosteling to midrange hotels with air-conditioning to, phew, finally you’ve made it, some rambling resort in Thailand.
It’s a trap! Jump off! (Or, more realistically: Don’t seethe with envy over all those rich folks eating in them fancy dining cars, drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.)
Money just creates a buffer between you and the people you’ve come to visit. Money, if spent without thinking, buys space and distance: bigger rooms, bigger cars, private compartments on trains. But for that travel magic to happen, sometimes you need to be forced into proximity: in the cheap seats, on the sidewalk, at the public market.
“Discomfort” can also connect us to the past. I just spent a few days at Los Poblanos, hands down the best hotel I’ve ever stayed at (proof: this was my second visit, for vacation). Part of the reason it’s better than any typical “luxury” hotel is the physical reality of the place: the windows crank open; the thick old light switches are a little hard to flip; the door latches are intricate and don’t shut immediately behind you; the farm animals make noise. Of course nothing is truly painful: The beds are sumptuous, and I could turn on the a/c if I wanted to. But the irregularities haven’t been sanded away, as money tends to do, and the place is still filled with little reminders of how life used to work.
Then again, I’m writing this from a suite in Las Vegas, and I’m perfectly happy to be safely swaddled in a/c comfort, away from the masses (Masters of Beer Pong tourney happening downstairs!).
This trip, in which we’re going across the Southwest without a car, was an experiment in applying travel strategies I use in other countries to more familiar turf. But on this trip, I’ve found myself choosing the more “comfortable” option frequently: the parlor car on the train to the Grand Canyon, the flight to Vegas instead of the long bus ride. Which may say as much about the United States as it does about me.
So: travel wisdom is a work in progress–and at least I have gotten my share of discomfort walking in 115-degree heat!
Your thoughts? When is comfort worth it? When did you feel like it was unnecessary or just got in the way?
Here’s the master list of tips, with links back to the posts. Employ on your summer vacation, and tell me how it goes!
1. Go to the bad part of town.
Like nice families, nice neighborhoods are all the same. Money creates global culture and same-everywhere cappucino.
2. Go to the ugly places.
Learning to love the not-immediately-lovely is a skill. And fewer tourists go to nondescript spots, leaving more room and space for you to meet normal people.
3. Go where the tourists are.
I know, I’m contradicting myself. But sometimes it’s great to hang out with tourists–especially if they’re from the country you’re visiting.
4. Be lazy.
Slow down. Do less. Skip the sights, especially if they might make you so cranky you’ll resent the whole country.
5. Travel by inefficient transport.
Like they say, man, the journey is the destination.
6. Drink the water.
Actually, it’s probably safe in many more places than you think. That ice cube won’t kill you (probably).
7. Don’t negotiate with taxi drivers.
Click through to understand why.
8. There’s no shame in sleeping.
Enjoy the siesta–it’s a cultural experience.
9. Bonus: Get older.
This wasn’t in the first series, but it came up after. Travel just gets more fun as you go along.
10. Second bonus: Be uncomfortable.
Edited to add this item, just thought up: “Luxury” can be synonymous with isolation. Money can be a barrier between you and what you’ve traveled so far to see.
Any other tips to add? What have you learned through travel? Share in the comments.
Following up the runaway success of my post on Terminal 21 in Bangkok, I think I might become a specialist in theme malls. I admit I felt a little thrill at going to the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai not so much because I admire the 14th-century traveler (though I do), but because I was hoping for some really tacky things to take pictures of.
It certainly looked promising. The idea is that the mall’s various sections represent the major places Ibn Battuta traveled: Egypt, India, Persia and China.
Next to the mall is a hotel–that’s the place with the Morocco theme. (Because IB was from Morocco, I guess–so that’s his home base, where he rests his head?)
The entrance closest to the metro is the Egypt-theme one. Check it:
So I’m sauntering in, thinking it’s gonna be super-cheesy…but this is some kind of crazy educational mall. There are all these displays about medieval Arab mathematicians and their assorted genius inventions.
In the Persia court, there was a touchscreen game to play, involving some surprisingly tricky geography and history questions. I got killed by the Black Death before I could make it to the Far East. Story of my life.
One display even explained properly how all these Arab-invented navigational tools, like astrolabes and quadrants, work. I'm used to just seeing them in dusty museums. Here, you could play with them and line them up with fake stars and things. My actual retention of information is poor, but at the time, I certainly thought, “Wow–I finally get it!”
The coolest thing was this, in the India wing. Even though the explanation panels weren’t working, nor was the device itself. Guess what it is?
I didn’t know it was a clock at the time–I only read about Al-Jazari’s elephant clock a couple of days later in a museum. But, still. I love that there’s even a bit of grass in the elephant’s trunk. For authenticity.
And the mall is just remarkably beautiful.
(If that green font is looking kind of familiar…yeah, it’s Starbucks.)
By the time I got to the China wing, I was genuinely agog.
The funny thing is that, despite all this lavish detail, the mall is just not a very good mall. It doesn’t rate a special air-conditioned tube entrance from the metro, so you have to trudge across the pavement in the heat. And if you look back to see how far you’ve come, you see a whole mass of power plants and smokestacks.
It’s all on one floor–no fancy escalators to take in the view from. And the shops aren’t particularly great–in fact, the whole place smells like vinyl from all the cheap shoe stores. (Not complaining–I got some much-needed new sneakers.) There’s a ‘Marble Slab Creamery’ (the much nicer Mall of the Emirates has a real Cold Stone) and other various not-quite-right businesses, like Borders books. Which I thought shouldn’t exist anymore.
And the clientele is a little more downscale. Which means that, instead of tourists in I’m-on-holiday getups and Emirati ladies in rhinestone-studded abayas, there were lots of people in sort of average clothing from wherever they were from. Which was frankly a bit of a relief after all the other Dubai craziness. And, in some cases, it meant they fit in nicely with the decor.
If you’re curious about Ibn Battuta at all (Google did a doodle for his birthday on February 25), do yourself a favor and read Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s books about traveling in his footsteps. The series starts with Travels with a Tangerine, in which TM-S arrives in Dubai and visits this very mall. Hijinks ensue. Truly, it’s great travel writing–hilarious and edifying. You might even be able to buy it at the Borders.
OK, this is just total eye candy for travel geeks. I don’t even like malls. But Bangkok is a mall kind of town, and when Rod (yes, he met us in Bangkok again this year) told me that there was a new airport-theme mall, I of course had to go.
It’s at the Asok BTS stop (aka Sukhumvit Soi 21). You can enter from the SkyTrain level, but we arrived on foot.
At an airport-theme mall, the security setup even makes sense!
The info-booth girls wore adorable outfits. Two, in fact: At night, the stewardess uniform was black with green trim.
Airport-style signage was everywhere.
Each floor is a different “destination.” The London floor had a red double-decker bus. The floor with the movie theater was Hollywood, of course.
The Istanbul floor had a lot of booths selling crafts. They had some font confusion. Unless perhaps Terminal 21 also enables time travel back to pre-Atatuturk days of Ottoman Turkish script?
I also felt vaguely uncomfortable on the ground floor, the Caribbean.
They seemed to put the most effort into the San Francisco floor.
Just when I started to feel like I was in an even cheesier version of Fisherman’s Wharf, we found the food court. Ah, maybe that’s why there’d been so much care put into the SF floor. The food court–aka Pier 21–was an assemblage of some of Bangkok’s best-known street-food people, in spiffy mall style. But not too spiffy style–I like how everyone still operated out of plastic tubs.
We grazed and gorged.
Afterward, we stopped at the bathroom. The theme-ness started getting a little confused here, because the bathroom apparently had its own theme.
It was all set up inside like some rustic pizza joint, with brick everywhere and a wood oven (yes, in the bathroom), and a gargantuan rolling pin hanging from the ceiling over all the toilet stalls. I was a little lulled by the fancy Japanese toilets with the warm seats, so I didn’t take any pictures.
As Rod pointed out, they didn’t go quite as far over the top with the airport/travel theme as we would have liked–I mean, that woman dusting the San Francisco trolley was wearing a random French maid outfit, when she could’ve been wearing a depressing powder-blue polyester jumpsuit!
Why didn’t they consult the real experts before building? An army of frequent fliers could’ve over-designed the place. The Thais just have to focus on the food. Now that’s synergy.
Remember travel agents? I think I last used one in 1996, to book a trip to the Dominican Republic.
In Greece, where as we all know from the news, they’re not really keeping up with the program, it was hard to even find ferry schedules online up until a few years ago. And, as far as I know, you still have to buy tickets from a travel agent.
Peter and I happened to pop into this place for our Hydra tickets, and it was everything you want in a travel agency.
Since I read this nice reminder from Fortnighter that flying isn’t so terrible, I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called “golden age” of travel. I tend to agree things are pretty good right now.
Aside from the asinine security situation, flying is pretty great, even when it’s not supposed to be. In the same 10 days, I flew first class on Thai Airways (thank you, frequent-flyer miles) and Spirit Airlines. Thai was fine but not mind-blowing, and Spirit was not that terrible: it was insanely cheap and got us there relatively on time, and Peter booked it directly online the minute we decided to take it.
Sure, the QM2 didn’t have a bouillon cart or other old-school niceties, but it probably was more comfortable than if we’d crossed the Atlantic in decades past. (As for train travel…well, trains aren’t getting nicer, except in Germany maybe, and Japan probably.)
This travel agency in Greece reflects this same nostalgia problem. I miss all the groovy linoleum and old posters, but I don’t miss the agency itself.
Although…our ferry tickets were printed out on a dot-matrix printer, with those perforated edges you have to tear off. I kinda miss that.
Following on the heels of the quickie Munich visit…we spent even less time in Japan, and it was just in the Tokyo Haneda airport, but still, it was enough time to have our minds blown.
We made a beeline for duty free, to procure a couple of bottles of IW Harper bourbon, on a tip from a friend in Bangkok. Apparently, the Japanese, being the Japanese, liked this bourbon so much they just made a deal with the American distillery to buy all of it and sell it only in Asia. It’s good, and comes in a pretty bottle, along with 800 other types of whiskey I’ve never heard of.
Then we used the bathroom. Sweet Jesus, but which bathroom?
I could’ve spared myself the decision-making if I’d just gone in this bathroom, but it was frankly a little scary.
And then…did you know they even make modern squat toilets? I did not. Please admire the support bar.
After navigating that bit of craziness, we needed sustenance. To the ANA lounge!
I know everyone’s seen a bottle of Pocari Sweat by now. But have you seen a pitcher of Pocari Sweat?
There was also coffee from a machine that ground beans on demand. And beer from what looked like a soda fountain, but which tipped your glass to the appropriate angle for perfect foam.
And also in the liquids department, they had this adorable soy-sauce portion, for titrating one drop at a time onto your surprisingly satisfying rice balls filled with something pink.
But this is where things got really delightful:
Like you, I was thinking sundae toppings. But no. Here they are in action in my miso soup, still looking like candy:
Later, on our flight, the mind-bending continued. I only have this pic, in which the item on the lower right involves fish eggs, and the strawberries were steeped in vinegar with juniper berries. And after that, there was a whole series of disturbing-looking things–including a dry and slightly withered shrimp, a cube of brown jelly with shreds of things floating in it, and a gray chalky thing that looked like a rock but wasn’t–that were incredibly tasty and vaguely fishy.
Apparently, all those Spanish chefs with their nitrogen tanks and their hydrocolloids are really working their asses off to recreate what’s just the daily experience in Japan. Next time, we’ll stay for longer.
In the course of our European train jaunting, Peter and I spent all of six hours in Munich, but it yielded a post worth of ridiculous photos–and none of them even involved us being drunk and stupid in a beer garden. I think the Munich tourism board should be proud of that.
Directly across the street from the train station is a branch of the Karstadt department store, which Peter wanted to visit for nostalgia’s sake, and to take the edge off his childhood raspberry-jam-filled cookies no longer being available in the station itself.
We were looking at the store directory, and there among the usual departments was ‘Traditional Costume.’ Beeline up the escalators to be greeted by these fine folks:
We wandered through the racks in a daze. Astounding detail and variety. Two huge rooms full of Bavarian chic. I had no idea this was such a thing.
There were some teenage girls dressing up in crazy outfits and taking each others’ pictures. It would’ve been a little too creepy to take their pictures, so we just posed for our own, without committing to Full Dirndl:
Peter’s dad (Greek) used to own lederhosen, by the way. Peter’s mother (German) finally refused to let him wear them out of the house, after one too many embarrassing jaunts to the newsstand in them.
The really illuminating thing about Bavarian traditional costume was how much it looks like American country-western wear. Of course. All those Texans with their smoked meats had to come from somewhere.
We finally backed away from the lederhosen (even on the sale rack, we were talking at least 90 euros minimum on any outfit) and headed for the miniature trains. They just don’t have miniature-train sections in American department stores. Certainly not ones where the glass is smudged from people pressing their noses against it longingly.
After that, at a beer hall, we were nearly as dazzled by variety. German menus seem to consist of the same five words (brat, sauer, etc) in noun and adjective form, magically recombined to produce more than a hundred distinct dishes. Peter and I wound up with venison cutlets (neighbors at the table translated: “Um, Bambi?”) and spaetzle. And giant beers. And Bavarian cream for dessert. Which we were disappointed to see was not just ‘Cream’ on the menu.
Just when I was settling into the good humor around me, as if into a warm bath, wallowing in the hum of hundreds of pleasantly drunk people and buttery food, Peter mentioned, “Oh, yeah, it was in places like this where Hitler really rallied the crowds.” So weak, humanity–that people at their most convivial, most singing-along, can so easily be carried off in another direction entirely.
After a bit of walking around, sobering up and digesting, I’d shaken off the landlust gloom, and it was time to get back to the station for our overnight train to Amsterdam. Magically, we were getting a little hungry again, and opted for a sausage.
Peter bought a beer for the train. But not the biggest beer available.
You can also see in the pic that we’ve selected quite a lot of Haribo. Only later did I add it all up and realize we’d bought a whole kilo of the stuff–I guess I hadn’t sobered up quite as much as I thought. Still, the flavor of Munich stayed with us for weeks–nearly as good a souvenir as lederhosen.
Ah, the Pyramids. Last remaining wonder of the ancient world. Monumental tombs for the pharaohs. Engineering mystery.
And pain in my ass.
I’m not the only one to think this. Every tourist I’ve ever met in Egypt has looked shell-shocked when they mention their trip to the Pyramids.
It shouldn’t be this way. Egypt’s second source of income after foreign aid is tourism, and the Pyramids are the number-one tourist attraction by far. They’ve been grossly mismanaged, probably because Zahi Hawass, ex minister of antiquities, was too busy wearing his silly hat on National Geographic specials to care.
Sorry to be so rancorous about such an important and impressive pile of rocks. They are pretty cool.
This photo sums up the problem of visiting the Pyramids. I didn’t want to take this photo. I didn’t even want to be out in the desert where you have to be to take this photo. But some guy with a camel started chatting me up, and because some days it’s easier to smile than it is to snap and draw the line, and that doesn’t even work anyway, I ended up letting him walk with me, and then of course the next thing I know I’m on the damn camel and we’re tromping out to the photo-op spot.
He was a nice guy, this camel guy. He asked me to write a text message to his German ‘girlfriend.’ He tried to get me my Coke for a reasonable price from the guy selling them from a foam cooler. He had lovely eyelashes. And he asked me for a ridiculous amount of money, even though I had never hired him. I knew that would happen the minute he said hello, but like I said, some days it’s easier to smile.
Anyway, this wasn’t a terrible experience, mostly because I didn’t have much at stake that day and I knew what to expect. By duct-taping my rose-colored glasses to my face, I could still enjoy the guy’s company without getting too peeved about this whole camel deal being forced on me. But most people have far worse problems at the Pyramids–like actual jerks who yell and threaten and fight to get more money out of tourists.
This makes it sound like the camel guys (and there are horse guys too) are the problem, and if they just banned them from the Pyramids area, everything would be fine.
Ah, but…two problems:
1) The Pyramids are spread over a big area, so the horse and camel rides are actually useful.
2) The horse and camel guys are from the village next to the Pyramids, and they have exactly zero other ways to make money. (Well, except for the Mubarak regime hiring them to beat up their compatriots in Tahrir Square. That’s how desperate they are.)
Zahi Hawass et al. knew they couldn’t get rid of these guys completely, but tried to control them by erecting this horrific wall between the village and the Pyramids. It looks like a mini-Palestinian barrier fence, and all it does is make the horse and camel guys move up the road to try to nab tourists before they get to the Pyramids.
This starts at the Giza metro stop, where seemingly concerned strangers sidle up and tell you which bus to take to the Pyramids. Then of course try to sell you on horse rides while you’re waiting for the bus. Or they jump in your taxi when it’s stopped in traffic. Or, wait, backtrack: they get the guy at your hotel to sell you a “sunrise tour” of the Pyramids, which means you show up two hours before the site opens, and you pass the time by talking to a guy who wants to sell you a horse ride.
It would be funny if it didn’t drive tourists to breakdowns and rages. The day I visited, I must’ve said ‘no’ about 856 times. And if you don’t say ‘no’, it must mean yes. So, yeah, I was basically date-raped by a camel.
I wish I could just advise people not to go to the Pyramids, as I think they’d be a lot happier with their trip to Egypt. But I know that’s the grumpy outlook. Though Anthony Bourdain didn’t go to them on the Egypt episode of No Reservations.
My friend Hassan is a tour guide, and he happened to be on that episode. He was the one telling Tony all about the Pyramids, so that Tony didn’t have to go.
Hassan has a dream of fixing the Pyramids, of finally solving this problem with the horse and camel guys, who provide a useful service but are the source of so much aggravation. He’d like to help them form a cooperative of some kind, so they’re not all competing with each other, and there’d be set prices. Oooh, and maybe an orderly line! (Sorry–that might just be me getting carried away.)
I’d love to connect Hassan with some people working in tourism in other countries who might advise on how to go about organizing something like this. Or people working in NGOs with this kind of experience. Any ideas? Mexico connections are an obvious choice, as a lot of tourist services in the Yucatan work on this model.
In the meantime, I was heartened at least by how many Egyptians were at the Pyramids when I visited this year. I’ve never seen this before. Then I was disheartened to see them also being hassled endlessly by the horse and camel guys. By the end of the day, they looked as beat as me.
Sorting out the camel and horse situation would be as radical and helpful a change as installing meters on Cairo taxis–which has been done successfully. Cairo taxi drivers are now a delight to ride with. And I bet many of the horse and camel guys would also be excellent ambassadors for Egypt, if they weren’t so desperately fighting for the last tourist dollar.
All suggestions welcome. Have you been to a tourist site that was remarkably well managed? Or poorly managed? This isn’t rocket science–places have solved it, and probably not for too much money. Somewhere as great as the Pyramids deserves a lot better.
Every year since who knows when, our friend Frank Plant has hosted Franksgiving in his fantastically cool digs in Barcelona. By the time we got around to attending, it had already grown from a cozy meeting of close friends into an insane, overcrowded phenomenon, and shrunk back to a more manageable size. If you can’t be ahead of the curve, it’s a lot better to be well behind it.
Turns out that “more manageable” now means 46 people. That’s 46 people expecting Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, even if they’re Spanish and don’t really get the whole deal and wonder why we insist on eating the exact same thing every year, and without even any pork in it.
When Peter and I told Frank we’d finally be able to come, Frank drafted us for kitchen duty. Which is no surprise–I think every time we’ve visited Frank, we’ve wound up cooking dinner. Though usually only for about 20.
So, uh, this time it would be 46. Did I mention that already? Last time I cooked for that many people, for a friend’s wedding in 2002, I nearly had a breakdown I was so exhausted.
Peter did the turkey. Two Dutch friends, the Statler and Waldorf of the whole event, were complaining about previous years’ turkeys, so Peter took the bait–he’d brine those birds and smoke them.
This also freed up Frank’s rather tetchy oven for other work. Honestly, I have no idea how he’s pulled it off in years past.
But he’s done it. He has a vision, and he has shopping lists. And he has a crew of people at the nearby Hostafrancs market who were delighted to help. We picked up three turkeys from the poultry stand, where the sturdy ladies use a set of counter-mounted shears to ka-chunk carcasses into pieces. We loaded up on snacky things and sherry vinegar. We snagged some rare radicchio for this bean salad thing Frank wanted to try.
Then we got down to business. Or tried to. Peter went up to the terrace to assess the grill for smoking. As he was poking around, the whole bottom of it dissolved in a shower of rust.
I learned in 2003, when Peter and I had to build the rigging for a lamb roast, that if you’re going to embark on an improbable dinner scheme, then someone involved should be a welder.
Handily, Frank is one.
He patched up the grill, and even added a little smoke chimney and built Peter a rake for the coals.
Once the birds were squared away, we could get down to kitchen business.
Here’s where the story gets boring. Thanks to a small army of volunteers chopping onions, peeling potatoes and running out to the store, everything went so smoothly I thought I was forgetting something.
That left me time to concentrate on my favorite thing: gravy. I made about half a gallon. My capacity for portion assessment ends at about 20 people–after that, I just imagine the Mongol Horde.
Periodically Frank would pop by the kitchen and ask how everything was going. And he would say exactly what I was thinking: “Shit! 46 people!”
One time Frank rolled through, I put him to work slicing the radicchio. Ah. Turned out it was red cabbage. Classic grocery-shopping-in-a-second-language issue. We rolled with it.
At this point, I have to give credit to Spain as a whole, despite their lack of radicchio. Were it not for its customary insanely late dinner hour, we would’ve been screwed. But with guests arriving at 9pm, and aiming for a sit-down time of 10pm, not only was everything done well ahead, but I even had time to take a shower and change into turkey-fat-free clothes. I hereby propose American Thanksgiving be forthwith considered a late-night affair. That traditional afternoon start is a bitch. No wonder everyone falls asleep.
Anyway, meanwhile, upstairs, the heavy lifters and Anna’s thorough vacuuming (which sounds better in its Spanish-cognate form, ‘aspiration’) had transformed Frank’s workshop into a banquet hall.
Peter pulled the by-now-gorgeous birds off the fire.
And Jim got to carving.
We gave everything a little reheat, tossed the candied walnuts in the now-red-cabbage-and-green-bean salad and ladled out the gravy. There was plenty to go around.
And, magnificently, room around the table for all 46 people.
The photo of Jim carving comes courtesy of Jan, the Dutch Statler, who at least admitted the turkey was better than it was in years past. And all agreed the red cabbage was far better than the radicchio would’ve been–happy accidents.
Another way we should tweak American Thanksgiving: have dancing after. Thanks Drew, Jim and Kris for rocking it till the break of dawn.
The next day, which was surprisingly un-fuzzy, considering the dancing till dawn, we rolled out on the train to Verona.
Guess what vegetable they just love in Verona and seemed to be selling at every corner market? Radicchio. Whatever. Over it!
I could end on this note, but it seems a little dishonest–it sounds like I just whip up this kind of party all the time, no prob. In fact, over the past five or six years I’ve gotten burned out on these heroic-cooking events (yes, after publishing a cookbook that’s very much in favor of such events). I got sick of being frantic and never getting to talk to anyone properly, or even enjoy the food, and now Peter and I are happy to have six or four or even just two people over for dinner. But Franksgiving was a great example of how these events are so inspiring when they go right, when the prep is really just a pre-party, a great chance to chat while prepping mounds of vegetables, and to solve problems on the fly. Thanks to Frank for reminding me.
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Here’s the rough logistics, should you be up against a similar killer situation:
For 46 people: