Eating with the Locals

In my endless search to find a decent hotel room in a decent part of
town, I've made astute use of online restaurant reviews to try and get a
feel for the area.

Everyone has their own opinion and the gauge swings wildly. But you can
always tell, and know to ignore, any review by an American of a European
restaurant.

"...service was terrible, we had to wait 30 minutes for our drinks..."

Well, firstly, In some parts of the world people consider a meal to be a
social event that is to be enjoyed, instead of a personal curse that you
must get over with a quickly as possible. You are meant to take the time
to chat with friends and family and discuss the events of the day. What
you don't want is a waiter hovering over you learning about your personal
life.

Secondly, I often wonder if all the bad service is really just a clever
plan to annoy Americans.

"Our service is slow, but it keeps the Yankees away."

Thinking about this, I thought it was worth making a list of the many
other ways Europeans can make Americans feel out of place :


Drink alcohol at any hour of the day or night.

No, they are not alcoholics, they are just social. Contrary to popular
belief it is not crime to have a beer at lunch, you are allowed to order a
bottle of wine for yourself and, as you are not going to eat until 9pm,
you can have a Martini on the way home from work. But don't confuse this
with an excuse to do endless tequila shots or drink a 5th of Jack, Spring
break is so 'last year'.

Smoke everywhere.

It won't matter where you sit, or what you do or say. You can even try
and ask for a table in the non-smoking section. All you have to do is
wait about five minutes and then two people will turn up, sit right next
to you and start chain smoking. Eventually they actually bother to find
an ashtray. After you leave, they will go back to the bar and wait for
their next mission.

Not make you wait for your table.

Nope, no waiting here. They will take one look at those plaid pants
you're sporting and put you at the rickety table behind the pot plant near
the toilets, the one that is used for the staff meals. Go on, just try
and ask for 'that one by the window, when it is free'. Get back to me
when they stop laughing at you.

Foreign language menus.

If you can hold you liquor and beat a path through the smoke to the table,
the floor staff will stall you by giving you the menu in the local
language. Don't try and bluff them, they know you can't read it, that
camera bag was a dead giveaway. You can ask for the English version, but
the prices will be different.

Speak a foreign language.

You may have faked your way past the menu but they will then ambush you
by sending every bus boy, trainee waiter and the hostess past to ask you
a different question in a different accent. If you're adventurous just say
'no' to everything. You may end up there sitting there for a while and
your fish won't have any sides, but you won't ever see the bill.

Speak French.

This deserves a special mention because it annoys just about everyone.

Staff who actually have a clue about the menu.

In some of these places the same staff have been working here all their
lives. (They have to, Mum owns the place). So don't try and be clever
and ask them if they know how the duck is prepared. Not only will they
tell you, but they will also entertain you with a long and arduous story
about how it was raised and exactly which side of the valley the carrots
came from.

Detailed and incomprehensible wine lists.

Think you know what a Chardonnay is ? think again.

Expensive prices.

All that truffle oil and a a wine list thats puts just about any liquor
store to shame can only be attained through a carefully crafted art of
manipulating exchange rates, fleecing tourists and outrageous percentages.
It really won't help the experience if you convert the price of that steak
into dollars, just ask for another bottle and enjoy the ride.

No substitutions.

You don't want what's on the menu ? Try the place next door.

The only thing you should ever deep fry is bits of potato.

The Calamari is not undercooked. Yes, those are raw onions, and that is what
real Brie looks like.

Call 'fries', 'Frites'.

'Creme Fraiche', 'Moules', 'Au Gratin', they have a polite name for just
about everything, don't even think of asking for 'plain bread'.

'Sandoux' means lard.

It may sound exotic, but should you actually interrogate your server
about the interesting eel dish, don't be surprised when he says :

"It is, er, how you say, pork fat ?'

Not be fat.

Yes, the menu may be a minefield of butter, cream, starches, carbs and
Sandoux, and every table may be polishing of bottles of Bordeaux, but the
locals have this disgusting tendency to look mostly fit and healthy.
That's when happens when you are forced to walk to the railway station
twice a day and use the stairs. Bastards aren't they ?

Use the metric system.

Do you know how much 70cc is ?

Serve an entree the way it was meant to be served.

It is a 'Starter'. Your actual meal won't be here for another hour. It
is thus meant to be a small simple thing that doesn't require too much of
your attention so you can still talk, line your stomach against the next
bottle of red wine, and not die of hunger.

Cheese.

It's for desert, can you deal with that ?

Hide the bathroom.

Did you make it through the meal ? Did you just have too much wine ?
Well you had better be prepared ask. The bathroom is usually upstairs
behind an unmarked door and it is a 'unisex toilet'. Take note of those
two words. Unisex means that people aren't afraid to see a bloke whip out
the tackle and water a wall, and you don't have separate bathrooms at
home, so why should it be any different here ? Also, they aren't afraid
to call it a toilet.

Hide the restaurant.

So, you think you can handle everything they can throw at you ? Do you
honestly think you can pass yourself off as a local ? Well you stil have
to find the place. Bad directions from the concierge and lack of street
signs are only part of it. These places are hidden down alleys, above hat
shops or behind an unmarked door below street level. You won't find any
neon signs saying 'Drink Bud' here.

If you really want to eat, here's what you do.

Walk down the street until you find the first menu that looks interesting.
Present yourself to the waiter and everyone else inside and, in your
loudest and clearest english say the following :

"Your Restaurant looks wonderful. I want the finest your chef has to
offer and I have lots of money"

You'll be just fine.

I'm still friends with the band

Another country, another town, another restaurant,
and another basement with a band.

The difference is that this is a more up market place. The waiter was
telling me about it. It was in the old bank vault and still had all the
safe deposit boxes around the walls. The management decided to turn it
into a martini and cigar type venue, with the occasional live band,
thinking that the walls were thick enough to keep the sound under control.

I ended up down there because it was still early and I knew I could get a
comfortable chair, a coffee and relax for a few hours after dinner. I had
to agree with the waiter. This wasn't the going to attract the starving
students and they wouldn't have got past the bouncer anyway.

So as I settled in, and the band set up, I noted the arrival of the usual
suspects, namely family and friends. Well, more family really. The
people drifting in seemed to well dressed and over fifty. By the way the
place filled up I had to assume that the parents and extended family of
every band member was here.

You know it is a sign of your success when your parents give up telling
you and your dead beat friends to stop making that racket in the garage
and actually come out to watch you play. That or it is just resignation
that since you've survived to this age, then this must be more than
passing fad and probably even pays the rent. ( Although they still
secretly wish you'd dump that bass player boyfriend and put on some makeup
for once )

Also, the gig was nicely timed to be late enough for the folks to have
dinner, catch the opera and then go watch the kids play.

So they are out for the night and having fun. They get to drink in front
of the kids and not give a damn because it isn't their party, for once
they are the ones doing the crashing. They have cred because they know
the headline act, and they they get to tell the bouncer that 'they're
friends of the band'.

I'm willing to bet they will be respectfully quiet during the set but up
and dancing by the end of the night.

Some time later, when dad had finally made his way in after, presumably,
driving around for an hour looking for a safe place to park, the band
stopped tuning up, put down most of their drinks, and played music that
didn't actually suck.

They played a lot of old favorites from the R&B catalog and derivations
therein, including a deceptive funk version of 'all blues', which actually
works if you can keep it on the one, and you know what I'm talking about.
I saw the few strangers who didn't, and were expecting a sat night DJ and
house music, finish their drinks and leave.

Still, the band kept playing, there was an audience who cared, and fun was
had by all. Highlight of the night was when the singer thanked her
friends for showing up before one of the songs.

You just can't do better than someone in a breathy French voice saying
something from the heart and then banging out a version of 'Lady Marmalade'.

You know you're in another country when that happens.

Vive la difference

Sorry, we're closed

I'm in Copenhagen and I have just finished my book.

I hadn't expected to get through it so quickly, as I had cleverly
purchased a very dense 700 page novel that I had assumed would last me a
bit more than a week. But I had also assumed that Copenhagen would
actually be open on a Sunday and there would be lots of interesting things
to see and do. I had also assumed that my hotel was somewhere useful.

I made a lot of wrong assumptions

Getting into Denmark was fairly simple, once you got past the mad rumpus
that was a lot of Belgians and Danes hustling to get on the plane (orderly
queue is not in their vocabulary it seems) and I even managed to find a
train that went in the right direction and dumped me at the central
station

What wasn't so simple was that today was Sunday, on the easter weekend,
and everything was shut. Including Tourist Information.

So, unable to wrangle something as simple as a map, or even (gasp) ask
directions, I had to suck it up and jump in a taxi.

"Do you know where the hotel is ?"

"Yes."

"Is it far ?"

"Not far."

"Do you take credit cards ?"

"Yes."

As the taxi pulled out I suddenly remembered the important fourth question

"Is it close enough to walk ?"

"Probably,yes."

Damn

A very short cab ride later we pulled up at the hotel and I remembered the
other important question to ask all taxi drivers.

"Where is downtown ?"

"Back across the river where we came from ?"

"And this hotel is the closest ?"

"Mostly."

Not knowing what else I could add to the conversation I checked into the
hotel.

The room was, of course, another example of Danish design from hell that
would put an Ikea catalog to shame, so I got out of there as quickly as
possible. (Oddly enough, I've been to Sweden and all the offices looked
like hospital rooms from the 70s. Any clever design skills Ikea might
have, they are keeping for export)

So, armed with a map confirming that I needed to go back to the station,
and went for a brief walk. And brief it was.

You see, as I may have mentioned earlier, everything was closed. So while
wandering the streets looking at locked buildings may have its
architectural merits, it is not the black hole of time I was looking for.
Instead I ferreted out the cafe with the most comfortable couch, ordered a
coffee in the best Danglish I could muster and promptly finished my book.

Well, there were brief interludes where I had the adventure of navigating
a menu that seemed to consist of a lot of words that looked like 'bork'
(although 'burger' is spelled the same in every language it seems)

But even that could not detain me from getting to the last page of my less
than worthy tome sometime around sunset and leaving me in limbo for the
rest of the evening. Even if I could find a bookstore, it was now past
closing time and, as I may have mentioned earlier, it was easter Sunday so
closing time was, oh, yesterday.

Now the thought of a lazy Sunday afternoon in front of the television
loses its appeal when you add in the hotel room component and I did humour
the idea of going and checking my email for a brief second before my
sanity kicked back in and made me consider other alternatives. I thought
about measuring how long it would take to do a lap of the city and even
considered flagging down one of the boats in the canal and bribing the
owner for a tour of the islands. But I still had to fill in parts of
tomorrow so I didn't want to blow all my options on the first day

Instead I just found another cafe and spent some time watching the world
go by and taking notes about how the universe operates.

I'll give you three guesses where I wrote this.

Could you hurry up and leave

I almost got stuck in Dusseldorf.

The problem was that in theory I could go anywhere and I had a few days
to myself. However, any whimsical fantasies I had about spending a few
days in the south of France, or getting lost in the Alps, were rapidly
being shattered by the reality that I hadn't made any bookings, it was
already 5pm and the start of the Easter long weekend.

So I was under the gun. The last train to either Brussels or Amsterdam
was leaving in less than an hour and I couldn't commit to anything.

Booking travel at the last minute is, frankly, a pain the arse. All those
web sites for last minute travel are designed to (hopefully) optimise the
cheapest flight to the cheapest hotel. Unfortunately, they are usually
only bound to one or the other or worse, to some fly by night package
operator who wants to send you to some forsaken town, that looks nothing
like the photos in the brochure, where their brother owns the local
taverna.

So what do you do if can only work one of these at a time or have a
particular destination in mind. Do you book your hotel first, then find
transport, or do you do it the other way around ?

You obviously don't want to get to your city to find that it there is no
room at the inn. Well, I don't anyway. But you also don't want to lose
the flight booking it took you thirty minutes to track down and risk
paying last minute rates just to get into dodge.

Location is also important. Just because you can get a hotel room, there
is no guarantee it is actually some where useful.

Be wary of anything that is 'close to the airport'. It may be convenient
for your flight but there will be nothing for miles, and the only 'good'
restaurants are in the local mall with the rest of the homeless. (I have
a first account of someone who was pointed to the local soup kitchen). If
you are lucky the airport will be close to the city like Alexandria and
Washington-Reagan or London city airport. But you still have to find the
room.

If you go down the path of getting transport you have to process the
matrix of airline flight offering, multiple airports per city, and then
factor in peripherals like 'do you need a rental car?', 'can you get a
train from the airport?' or will you have to resort to the local mule and
hitchhiking?

Then you have the commitment factor. If you are lucky to find a flight to
the right location, there is the fundamental problem that airlines are
bastards and can count in five dimensions. Cancellation fees, change
fees, and the fact that the price changes hourly make 'shopping around'
something from mythology. (hint: travel agents have magical powers of
cancellation that us mere mortals can only dream of)

So what should you do ?

Well here's a tip:

Hotels let you cancel at the last minute. So go crazy, book rooms
everywhere. Hell, order some room service, since you'll be getting in
late, and while you're at it, get them to put a bottle of champagne on ice
and turn down the bed. To them this is all just on paper. If you show
they make money, if you don't they can probably re-sell the room.

Then, try and wrangle some transport.

I went to Brussels. They had hotels.

Too many timezones

Not enough days.

San Francisco, London, Stockholm.

The problem with not understanding foreign languages is that you can't
easedrop on a conversation, it just never registers with the consciousness
in the right way. I realised this in the restaurant last night when I
suddenly heard someone in the crowd speaking English and noticed that
everything else was just line noise.

Still, while I started to work on a mental thesis about why lack of
sensory input is probably quite isolating and may explain why travelers
sometimes behave the way they do (like work on a mental thesis about their
lifestyle), I was at least out of the hotel. I had finally recovered from
jetlag limbo and I was, at least, taking in the sights.

I was even motivated enough to take photos, but my new digital camera was
still stuck in shipping and never made it to me before I got on the plane.

I should have taken this as a sign, never fly an airline in receivership.

After spending about 2 hours on the phone with the travel agent trying to
assemble my magical mystery tour of Europe into some sort of coherency. I
got off to a bad start by actually attempting to fly. Now I'm
not going to bitch and whine about the fact that my business class seat was a
'middle bulkhead' (if you know what this means, you know why you'd hate
it) as it is hard to argue with a free upgrade. But the seat wasn't the
problem.

It was just one of those flights.

It started with one of the staff demanding that I hand over my pillow and
shoes as they were blocking the aisle, veered into her not wanting to
close the overhead bin (that she opened), to stash said pillow, because it
was too heavy to close, rapidly careened downhill as, for the Nth time,
the only movie worth watching had random lines of static and audio
dropouts, blew past dehydration caused by the staff ignoring any call
button from anyone, ran over the the guy next to me who insisted on
reading all night with both lights on and finished with a bang when they
ran out of fast track immigration cards for Heathrow ( and I you know what
that means, you will know why you want one ).

Yeah, poor me, I hear you cry, but if you were actually paying for
International business Class Service, you'd be a tad pissed off as well.

Suffice to say the whole visceral experience just sent me over the
edge and messed with my ability to deal with my jetlag. I got about 3
hours sleep that night and the next twenty four hours were a blur. What I
do recall was finding myself in the railway station with more than nine
hours to kill before it was safe to sleep, a flu like pain in my muscles
and a relentless desire to just lie down and have a nap.

I seriously thought about finding a park bench under a tree somewhere but
that really would have made me just a homeless guy with a laptop.

So instead I just rode it out and somehow ended up at another airport with
the most uncomfortable lounge chairs ever, squeezed myself into a plane
with absolutely no leg room and sometime later found myself in a taxi with
no idea where I was going, except that there was a hotel and a bed at the
end of the ride.

I nearly got rumbled at Swedish Immigration where I was so incoherent I
couldn't clearly express the address of my hotel and had to fumble for
my PDA and try to sound intelligent.

It was only by the end of the next day that I started to resemble myself
again and finally had a couple of hours to relax in the lobby with the
local team. Of course, this meant that we also made phone calls and had
to check email.

So a few hours became three hours and then my PDA decided to have time
zone synchronisation issues and shifted all my appointments by an unknown
number of hours. As this included critical things like flight times, I
then had to be a geek and not only correct all the errors but also
diagnose the problem and ensure that it never happened again.

Sometime after dark I finally made it to the restaurant.

I would have gotten out of there earlier but, hey, the last thing you want
to do is miss a flight.

It's not the destination...

It's the journey.

I may have, on occasion, mentioned that I don't always have a clear idea of
what I am doing or where I am going. While this is par for the course, and
the odd change to the schedule is to be expected, This week was the gold
medal of diversions.

If you were to sum up all the the standard problems I bitch about, twist
them into some sort of artistic representation of what this whole road
warrior thing looks like and, say, to turn it into a movie, you
would come up with something close to what I experienced.

See it wasn't just one bad experience. That sort of plot device is too
short and kills the character in the first act. Instead this was just a
slow decline of one bad vignette after another where, if I was writing
this, the hero would either defeat the gorgons for the third and final

In the background we can see that all the flights are delayed and he is
waiting standby for anything that will make his connection.

Cut to : The usual cramped seat in the back of coach and the comical farce
that is people trying to fit supersized bags in undersized overheads.

Cut to : Arriving at the far end of a terminal in Chicago, the
connecting flight is leaving from the far end of another terminal. Begin
the Long Walk.

Cut to : The toilets. Focus on the intermittent fluorescent light
overhead. Pan down to the Old Guy at the sink. He has had one of those
operations that leave him with a hole at the base of his neck. He is
hacking badly and doing his best to clear the hole and his throat.

Cut to : Waiting at the gate, all the flights are delayed again.

Cut to : Drinks service on the next plane. He has free drink vouchers.
Just as the Flight Attendants get to him, the plane hits turbulence and
they seat the staff for the duration of the flight.

Cut to : The Hero getting out of the plane after midnight and walking down the
long terminal. He is at the last gate. The terminal is a ghost town.

Cut to : Him trying to get past other passengers to old and deaf to get
out of the way.

Cut to : Those same passengers overtaking him later in a golf cart.

Cut to : Waiting outside for the rental car shuttle. Standing right next
to him is a Businessmen, smoking a cigar. Our hero is downwind from the
smoke. Pull back to reveal that the area is completely empty. There is
no-one else around.

Cut to : Arriving at the rental lot, It is windy and cold. His car is
a convertible mustang.

Cut to : The clock in the car says 1am. He is on a deserted country
road. The driving directions seem meaningless.

Cut to : The hotel. He is looking down a very long corridor. The room he
is given is at the far end of the building.

Cut to : The next morning, there is no breakfast on the hotel.

Cut to : He is back in the car, A coffee shop can be seen in the
distance. But the road is blocked by sequential 'no left turn signs'. No
matter how much he turns, the cafe is getting no closer.

Cut To : The cafe parking lot, as seen from inside The Mustang. Focus
on the BMW parked diagonally. It is taking the only 2 parking spots left

Cut to : The dashboard of the mustang. A coffee is in the cup holder. The
clock shows that he is late, He is speeding.

Cut to : The lobby of an office. He meets The Customer.

CUSTOMER
You're 8 hours early, we aren't doing anything until 6pm.

Cut to : Back in the hotel room, the hero is reading email :

MSP may catch fire again.

Need you back there next week for a few days

Need to delay trip to UK by 1 or 2 weeks

Cut to : A chain restaurant in a mall, around it is nothing but carpark
and cars. It is late evening, his work is done for the day. Our hero
parks in an empty spot miles from anything. It is still cold and windy.
He gets out of the convertible. The restaurant is called the 'Bahama
Breeze'.

Cut to : The Hero, he is sitting at the bar, reading the menu. He speaks
to the barman.

HERO
What do people do here ?

BARMAN
Drink

Fade out.


Tags travel,philly,hotel,restaurant,bar

Viral Marketing

Apparently, more than one person reads this blog.

So I want to try an experiment in Viral Marketing. The process is fairly
simple. It is like a chain letter, but without the guilt or any hope of
making large amounts of money.

I want you to find 3 other people and tell them about the blog. If they
like it, get them to tell 3 other people. If you have a really short
attention span you could just cut and paste the following:

---

Dear <fellow-surfer-of-the-net>,

I found this blog from some
<fool|guy|dot-com-victim|frequent-flyer> who seems to spend a
lot of time on the road and finds the <odd|interesting|bizzare|humorous>
side of what it takes to bounce around the country.

http://rftp.blogspot.com/

I thought you might find it
<interesting|useful-research|worth-plagarising|good-for-blackmail>.  If
you like it feel free to spam your friends and get them to read it as
well.

Share and enjoy.

---

Actually come to think about it, Tell as many people as possible, I'm
curious to see how far this can spread.

Can someone wake the man in the corner ?

Detroit, or Ferndale, or Troy, or wherever the hell this place is.

All I know is we are doing about 90 miles per hour on the freeway in the
general direction of somewhere civilized while I try and make a hotel
reservation over the phone. However, as we have no real idea where we are
at present I'm playing a geographically oriented version of '20 Questions'
with the reservation agent :

"We have a hotel in Troy"

"How far is that from here ?"

"Where are you ?"

"Um, Plymouth. No. Northville. I think. We just passed the 96."

"Ok, let me look"

"Oh. No. We're actually on the 96. I think we passed the 275. We're
heading east..."

And on it went.

We were only doing this because all the hotels in Ann Arbor were full.
There was something interesting going on in town, but they wern't going
to tell us what it was and we weren't allowed to sleep there. So we had to
try our luck in the suburbs of Detroit.

Eventually we just cut our losses, got some hand waving directions from
the agent and, an indeterminate time later, checked into a motel in the
middle of nowhere and went to get something to eat.

That's when we found The Party.

Walking into the first most decent place we could find we decided that we
would just settle down for one drink and a nice meal. We were sitting in
what was, at the time, the quiet end of the bar area debating what to
eat when we noticed that it was getting increasingly more crowded. Almost
unpleasantly so. After we had moved our table about three feet and the
waitress had tried to squeeze her way past for the fourth time, we finally
bailed her up and asked what was going on.

Oh, yeah, sorry about that. You see tonight is kind of special"

"How so ?" I asked.

"Well, one of the regulars here died the other day.

"He died ?"

"Yes. He was a really nice guy. He used to come in all the time and would
always sit here at the end of the bar. He was often in my section.

"Really ?"

"He was like only 40 or something, it was really sudden. So all his
friends are here to, well, say good bye."

Now I was honestly curious, I had to ask.

"So, how did he die ?"

"Oh," She said. "Liver failure."

WTF ?

On the inside I know we were both screaming to say something like "What,
liver failure? Are you out of your minds ? Are you having any guilt
issues right now ?". But on the outside, we did our best to keep our
composure.

My sales guy nearly sprayed his drink all over the table and tried not to
laugh. I tried keep a straight face and change the subject as
quickly as possible. I think we ordered more water for the table just to
make her go away.

As I watched them order another round of tequilas, I wanted to be
incredibly cynical and ask something like if any of these guys were in a
gun club. I wanted to know if when someone accidentally killed themselves
did they celebrate by getting together and shooting each other
in the foot.

"This might have killed Frank, but look, I can still walk."

But I figured that might get me thrown out. Instead, we ate as quickly as
possible and got out of there before either of us said something
embarrassing or offensive.

I guess you just have to get back in the saddle.


Tags travel,detroit,hotel,restaurant