Bascomb's Regrets

• How to make the ‘@’ sign on the local keyboard
• How to order a beer
• When restaurants close (by day)
• Which numbers to omit when you are dialing a local telephone number (different for mobiles and landlines)
• When everything else closes
• How to say ‘excuse me’ (as in ‘I’m sorry’, not ‘may I have your attention’)
• Whether / how much to tip
• Where bikes / cars / pedestrians have right-of-way, and whether tickets are issued for jaywalking
• What lengths to go to conceal yourself when changing clothes (excess modesty attracts attention)
• Whether English is widely used and understood (when trying the local language will just make you a nuisance)

Pre-read: I’ve traveled with (probably) everybody who is likely to read this. So, don’t be offended, and don’t be self-conscious (if you make it through this rambling post) when we travel together again. I like traveling with you, or else I wouldn’t do it.

Korčula is probably one of the most expensive cities in Croatia. There isn’t a ’single room’ to be had in Korčula, or a reasonable backpacker’s hostel either. Now, if you sleep in a double bed, you pay for both the left-hand side of the bed and the right-hand side of the bed. Is that because solitary travelers are undesirable as guests? Maybe solo flyers are 70% more likely to be psychopathic killers than those traveling in groups (if you exclude all-male groups in crew cuts and khakis, that is). So it’s not surprising that many solo travelers just get priced out of the market by hosting policies. A traveling companion is also a portable character reference: there is at least one person in the world who is not afraid to be stabbed to death (or snored to death) by you in a humid closet-cum-’grande suite’ before morning. A fellow traveler can innoculate you against homesickness. Your compadre also comes in handy when you’ve swum a half-mile from shore, leaving your passport, camera and all your cash in your pants pocket hanging from a tree limb in a cove where four young people are demolishing a case of Ožujsko and talking in loud voices. (But trust me, the water is so unbelievably ultramarine blue that you’re capable of forgetting this for some time.) With your companion you can play travel Scrabble in English without having to pretend that half of the s’s are š’s. Okay, and if the temperature ever dips below 90 (and you and your traveling companion feel a certain way about each other, and haven’t recently had a ‘discussion’ about whether Croatia has more miles of coastline than square miles), there’s the cuddling.
And so, BUT: here’s the main rambling reason why you should travel (sometimes) alone: it’s an opportunity to be someone different. I don’t mean like the woman who came back from a semester in London and three years later still had traces of West End in her accent. Instead, it’s more like, standing in line with a bunch of Italians when you jostle and push and mutter and tap people on the shoulder and puff up and then later buy those same people beers and talk in earnest about sports and the ideal shade and suppleness of a ripe tomato. Or you can offer a woman, with grandchild in tow for the day, to carry her charge, stroller and all, up three flights of stairs. Without a hint of self-consciousness, as if it were a natural thing for you to offer to do, instead of a creepy thing. You can work on that deep-belly laugh, accompanied sometimes by tears, the lack of which you suspect is limiting you in your career.
Or you can take other risks, too. Ever since George and I saw the guy hitchhiking from Kenai to Soldotna with his guitar on his back, I always wanted to travel with a large-ish musical instrument. Now, listen– I’m not trying to make myself (at almost 40) into a person who walks into the center of a square filled with tourists, throws down his hat, and announces that those capable of movement  should form as tight a circle as possible, No, but I am trying to get past something that somebody said to me long ago when I told him I was learning to play the guitar: ‘Cool–just promise me you won’t play in public until you’re good.’ Well, I’m not good (and having performed in public enough to know the difference between people moving toward you and people moving away from you)–but here’s the thing: if I saw the Youtube video of the guy playing ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ on solo violin during open mic, and I said to myself, ‘he’s good’–I should be that good; then at what point would I just give up on being a producer of sound and just consume the musical sounds of some 0.001% of people capable of making musical sound? We live in a country where, if somebody asks you whether you like sports, and you’re over 30, then you typically interpret the question as ‘do you like watching sports?’ On vacation I eat, sleep; I’m entertained; and I go crazy because there is an American Idol Simon in my head that I have to kill in order to produce musical noise.
Do you invent your vacation while you’re on it? This is nice, and it’s a bit easier than inventing your own work environment. (Fewer corroborating witnesses required, eh?) Here’s what I mean: the caffeine high at the bistro/cafe while I’m writing this (judge by length and rambliness of post) may expand to fill the entire day: the sounds of the people and their language and their babies are stored in raw form. But the subsequent 7km asphalt hike to the beautiful water is zipped, compressed into a neuron.Time-memory compression is a unique gift to the solo traveler. The opposite is what I call the ‘VCR’ effect (which name dates to the time I first noticed it): 1. Imagine taking a video of your most exciting day ever; 2. edit it down to 10 minutes that you find really exciting; 3; Watch the video–with another person pressing pause and relating all the intervening events wherever there is a gap or cut. I’m too selfish sometimes about what I store in flash memory–and I want to retain creative license when I go to edit. You and your traveling companion unwittingly remind each other of your identities: suppose you’re waiting for the check; if you’re by yourself you could be anybody because you haven’t opened your mouth yet; but if you’re killing the time, by talking about how long it’s taking for the check to arrive then you’re an impatient, ugly American tourist who can’t relax. Sometimes you become what you talk about.

(Poland, house pictured from the back)
Like half-melted Italian ice cream, it has waited long enough to be perfect, but then (not like Italian ice cream) it is built to last. It just feels decadent to me. I would have to share it with at least ten of you to feel quite right.

…at the Internet phone cafe.

Hey mom, just checking in from Vienna…
What time is it there, almost eleven?
Oh, past 2…well, I just called to wish Dad a happy birthday. Since it’s tomorrow I figured I wouldn’t get the chance otherwise…
Oh, it’s July 22…yeah–I keep getting that wrong don’t I…

Well, I don’t want to keep you up. I know Dad slept through everything…

…45 minutes later
Well, do you really want it to work?
How many times have you really sat down to talk about this?
Okay, I know you know what’s best…
Hello?
Hello?

…by ‘break in the heat’.
On my way into the museum, I struggled to keep my ice cream from melting all over me. During my walk around the exhibits the docents kept checking the windows. When I came out two of the museum 2 hours later I could see the environment had changed. It was 30 degrees cooler, with 40 mph winds, raining sideways, with tree branches and construction materials littering the ground. Now I’m touring the wreckage from the number 1 strassenbahn with a few dozen stranded commuters.

I don’t have everything I started with. Gone is the pair of volleyball shorts I took with me to Berlin. Large parts of my Eastern European phrasebook (Slovenian, Russian, ) are in the bin in the Orange Hostel in Krakow. ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’ (which was great) now belongs to the collection at the Stara Polana in Zakopane.  ‘An Army of Davids’ (which looked like a great book about how to work and contribute value to society outside of the corporation) is composting in the Tatra Mountains (a fate it doesn’t even deserve: I tossed it after reading a section where the author explains that individual citizens can be tougher on terrorists because they are less likely to be accused of racial profiling than government agencies are). I inadvertently made a more symbolic cut in weight when I attempted to reduce the length of the recharging cable for my phone.  I thought, I’ll just cut and splice the ends together and save the weight of 4 feet of cable. I envisioned a simple  two-wire cross section to the cable which would be duck soup to splice with my handy roll of duct tape. After making the fatal cut, when I saw the coaxial design, my first thought was ‘now, that’s an efficient way to make a charging cable’. Oh well: now my phone is off except when I’m taking pictures and sending them. That should buy me a few more days until I find a way to charge it again. Two significant pieces of my expensive winter trekking backpack are no longer with me–leaving me looking a bit ragtag but also decreasing my sense of need to fill the additional (now absent) exterior compartments. The guitar (my companion until Lomo comes) made it with me across the height of the Tatra, I’m thankful to say.

The other weight I’ve lost–maybe five pounds–I think is mostly due to the eastern European drinking fashion (all alcohol and coffee and no water). So I’m not exactly becoming fit and trim: just ‘beef jerky’ on my way to ‘mummy’. I am getting much better at callus maintenance, and am leaving small, dead bits of foot wherever I go. (Note to foot travelers: emery boards are worth their weight in gold.)
And while I weigh less and am carrying less, I also have less weight to throw around. The guy shows up alone, grey at the temples, sandals, guitar sticking out of his backpack, asks the difference between the $7 bed and the $9 bed–he gets a different reception from the group of Boston journalism majors on summer vacation asking the same question. I don’t think I have the air of a desperate person, but depending on the time of day and the location, I go from ‘interesting’ to ‘creepy’. As a white male, technology professional, approaching middle age, I’m not accustomed to having people question whether I should be in a place: I ought to be welcome wherever I go. But drinking my lunch out of a yogurt container in the shade of a quiet residential street in Krakow, when the woman walks by with her dog I feel like I might blow away in the wind.

There are no restaurants or bars on Ronald Reagan Place, which is at the center of Nowa Huta in Krakow. Nowa Huta is the Soviet-era planned community, the gift of Communism to the residents of Krakow. Perhaps the square was meant as a showplace for commerce, and they only wanted to include stores where you can buy durable consumer goods? (There are still several appliance stores here.) But it’s not a place where people seem to have gathered (for a drink, or a meal), in spite of its spacious plan and pretty gardens. Even with the name changed to honor an American president, that does not appear to have changed. Fitting? The most common grafitti tag is ‘Hutnik’, presumably a play on the words ‘Huta’ and ‘Sputnik’.

I think my intersection back in Noe Valley could use a sign like this. On second thought-if I got my own little sign prohibiting my pet peeve, then shouldn’t everybody else get theirs, too? Funny-as soon as I took the picture, a voice came out of the dark, saying ‘no pictures’. I can see him, furiously scribbling a new sign showing an outline of a camera with the red interdiction icon around it.

So, since I’m not drawing my fat tech job salary, I thought it would be a good idea to stay away from the euro during my summer ‘off’. (The euro has been lapping the dollar in a long-distance race ever since its creation.) So all the countries with the euro are way expensive for Americans; and all the countries east of the euro are (currently) very cheap for Americans. You hear stories about this or that spa treatment (okay, a twenty-minute massage for $4, enjoyed by a fellow traveler from Idaho, is something to crow about–or the guy from Boston who got change from his imported gelato, then used it to get him and his friends drunk on the way home). It applies to services, but what about stuff where the inputs are expensive for the seller? On the bus I was trying to do the math on this one: diesel costs $5 a gallon. Buses get, maybe, 10 miles per gallon of diesel. The trip is 100 miles. There are 30 seats on the bus, 20 of them vacant. How much do the tickets cost? Well, if the driver doesn’t get paid, and the bus is a magic gift from heaven, tickets have to cost at least $5, right? I paid $4.50.
And, as for as accomodations go, it seems that you pay less for more. For example, if you book a two- or three-star hotel for $50-75 a night, you can’t check in before 3 or 4 in the afternoon, no food is included, and there typically is no shared space with other visitors–when you arrive you’re expected to go into your room and be there by yourself. In a hostel, for $15-20, you can check in at 8 or 9am (for example, when your overnight train gets in) and have a morning nap (in case you didn’t sleep on the train); laundry is often a free service (I haven’t touched my laundry yet this trip, and haven’t paid to have it done either); breakfast is included; and the common space you share is great for hanging out and swapping stories with fellow travelers.
I’m gradually changing my tune on the whole theme of stories of what you can buy in Eastern Europe with dollars, though.  More on that later…

I wanted a lightweight phrasebook that would cover most regions I chose to visit this trip. The Lonely Planet phrasebook for Eastern Europe is out of print, so I picked up this one instead. I have some observations.

First, phrasebooks seem to me to assume a certain sophisticated/technical mental state on the part of the traveler: somebody who is planning what he’s going to say before he leaves home. Phrases such as, ‘From which platform does the train for Zagreb depart?’ I’ve cobbled together a crib sheet of the phrases I need most, and they more closely represent the mental state of a 3-year-old than a Polish station agent:

I want (would like)…

I am looking for…

Where is…(the bathroom)?

Yes, no, water

How much…?

How do I…?

…this one/that one

I don’t understand

Do you speak English?

Beer (by brand, always: never use the word for beer)/wine (generic, typically, unless you’re south of Milan)

Salad/vegetables

Most phrasebooks contain these phrases, but you have to collect them from all over and write them on one page that you can use to memorize the prononciations and refresh. Then, phrasebook authors want you to get on well with the locals, so they do a good job with these next ones, encouraging formal usage so that the speaker will elicit a sympathetic response to a foreigner trying to muscle his way through a six-syllable, eight-dipthong phrase for ‘have a good day’.

Please/thank you

Excuse me/I’m sorry (likely the first phrase I use, anywhere: the first significant thing you do in a new country, unfortunately, is to disobey/disregard some rule/custom for which you need to apologize)

Good morning/afternoon/evening

Hello/hi

And there are a bunch of phrases that, when I read them, I just wonder at the astounding variety of people there are in the world:

Can you take our order now?

We haven’t been served yet

This isn’t what I ordered

The room isn’t clean

Reading these phrases I can’t help but picture a couple traveling together, having spent too long looking for the perfect restaurant, hungry to the point of irritation, shifting uncomfortably in their seats while they wait for their needs to be anticipated by someone for whom tips are not a significant income component. But there is a huge category of missing stuff that I haven’t even found regularly in Lonely Planet phrasebooks: these are the phrases that you learn if you have any interest in a place whatsoever. These are the phrases you learn once you’re done glaring at unresponsive waiters and getting into it with old ladies who muscle past you in line at the bakery. These are phrases that you would use if you were planning to stay longer than a few days.

I’ll have what he’s having

What’s this called?

How do you say…What’s your name? My name is…

You’re welcome (when in doubt try the word for ‘please’)

It’s very good

I’m content / happy

What’s your favorite? My favorite is…

You’re very kind

This last one I learned from my grandfather; it’s a magic phrase. The first time I heard him say it, we were getting cherry pie in a diner and I just sat back in wonder that such a simple phrase could be so powerful. It travels well.