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A Thankful Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving I’m considering our work, the world, our health and our blessings. While times are tough economically, and our future comes with impressive challenges, we have lots to be thankful for. This morning my neighbor told me that, having saved diligently for years, her retirement account took a big hit this month. Yet she doesn’t regret having spent money on leading a full life, saying that every memory she’s built through travel and embracing a life with experiences still enriches her life.

I know fewer people will travel in 2009. We’ve been at this since the late 1970s, and there have been plenty of ups and downs. One thing I’ve learned is that while some people are hell-bent on travel and will take a trip regardless of an economic downturn, for many, travel will have to wait. And for those who wait, they spring back and we see travel booms following every downturn.

My philosophy as president of our tour company is to offer the very best tour value possible every year. We make the most out of every dollar invested, take good care of every minute spent and take full advantage of each opportunity to learn and experience our world.

Our staff of expert guides is thankful to have work in 2009, and we are thankful to have lots of great tours filled to capacity, and to be able to promise piles of travel fun. (I expect we’ll be about 25 percent down from the 400 tours we led in 2008.)

My business team just asked me if it wouldn’t be prudent to scale back our Christmas party for this year. (We’re renting the local senior center and employing a local caterer.) I said no. We will be lean and mean…but we won’t pull the rug out from those businesses. We’ll enjoy the holidays, work harder than ever, and share in the discovery and learning of a great year of touring in 2009.

While our tour department is excited about new itineraries, I am feeling the breeze of a torrent of new productions: Our country guidebooks now have great built-in maps; I’ve made exciting improvements to the tenth-anniversary edition of my Postcards from Europe book (due out this spring); we’re putting out new books on Athens, Vienna and Budapest; my new Travel as a Political Act book is nearing completion; our new TV series hits the airwaves this month and our Iran special will come out — with great national prime-time carriage — in January; our radio program now airs on about 110 public radio stations for an hour each week; and an exciting new leader on our staff (who came to us from Nike and Amazon) is about to take our website to new levels. And I’m still speaking out: Two days ago I was in Spokane’s Bing Crosby Theater working for the ACLU and talking about ending the prohibition of marijuana to 600 caring people (law professors, bar association people, doctors and ACLU types from eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana).

Tomorrow I hit the road, visiting eight cities in as many days (San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Portland). My personal approach to our economic challenges: Work hard, produce and be thankful for what we have. And, as I say to end each of my shows…”Keep on travelin’.” Have a thankful holiday.

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Granny Smiths, Quiet Shirts, and a Tiny Little Boop

This morning I sorted through my shirts and chose a quiet one (one that doesn’t make noise when my body moves). At my regular coffee shop, they know I like a “grande latte, extra hot” but I needed it without any milk — an Americano extra hot instead. Then I drove into Seattle (to “Clatter & Din,” the recording studio we use), excited to record the voice track of our Iran TV special.

It was a great day. By the end, my head is exhausted. If you asked my brain what’s the most demanding thing I do in my work, it would be standing in a recording studio to tape the voice track of one of my TV shows.

Of course “tape” is a relic of an analog day back in the last century. Today it’s digitalized, and the engineer can edit the sounds I make as easily as I can edit this Word document. I’ve learned to stop mid-sentence, take a breath, survey the script landscape, and carry on in a way that can be edited together seamlessly.

Simon Griffith (my TV director/producer) is a master who wears a million hats in our production. My passion (the words) coincides with his least skillful area (transcribing the fine edits we make in our last loving “script scrub” with managing editor Risa Laib into the final version of the script). So I bring my penciled-up last copy as a backup for his “ready to record” printout of our script. Every word matters.

Eric, the sound engineer, is excited about a new “rock ‘n roll” mic (a U-250 or something). He loves the way it “picks up the complexity of the mid-range and makes the bass rich yet not tubby.”

I’m excited about this last step in the production of our Iran show. As it’s an hour long (compared to our regular half-hour Europe travel shows), we’ll be working the entire day to record the 14-page script. While my legs get tired, I stand up and even clip the script to the top of the fully extended music rack to open up my body and get the most energized sound. Granny Smith apples — which the Clatter & Din people know I like to keep my voice crisp — are lovingly sectioned in a dish in the booth. I’m confident my voice will make it through the day (yet always a little nervous, because when it goes, it’s gone).

Simon and Eric analyze and time my work as slowly, one paragraph at a time, we work our way through the script. Simon (who’s timed everything to the finished video editing) will say, “I need it half a second faster.” I do it again a bit too fast and he’ll say, “Give me a Goldilocks.” We all know that how each word is hit is critical in making the meanings clear. Saying something worded harshly with a smile can make the point clear without being off-putting.

The mic really is good. It sounds great in my headphones. During one read, I passed a little gas daintily yet audibly. We listened again, and sure enough, it was there. (We left it in — like a builder leaves some fun graffiti under the drywall on the frame of a house he’s building.)

Many pronunciations are debatable. We need to live with whatever pronunciation we choose. Consistency trumps correctness. Mooz-lim, Muzz-lim; ahm-bee-ahnz, am (like yam)-bee-ahnz.

The work drags on. It seems I can always do a paragraph a little better. I’m driven to communicate not words…but ideas. While it’s a nice to be done early enough to beat the miserable Seattle traffic, we didn’t make it. And driving stop-and-go home, I was very excited about having perhaps our best production yet in the can.

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Cliché Croatia

I’ve learned a lot from concerned feedback from Croatians and from Cameron Hewitt, the co-author of our Croatia & Slovenia and Eastern Europe guidebooks (and a driving force behind us getting that part of Europe up to speed with our coverage of the West). I’m fascinated by the Cold War and their struggles for freedom, and with the wars of the mid-1990s in the former Yugoslavia, but this is becoming old news. Here is an example of feedback to a recent article I wrote, and the response by Cameron (which I agree with a hundred percent):

Dear Mr. Steves,

It was painful to read your latest article on Dubrovnik and Croatia. I would have thought it was a reprint from 10 years ago. First of all the real story is that Dubrovnik has become a victim of its reputation. It is a laggard in post war tourism restructuring compared to other Croatian destinations. Much as energy wealth has kept Russia from reforming, Dubrovnik’s traditional reputation and hordes of Cruise Ship day trippers have lead to a town that is expensive, and offers second class amenities and value.

The real story of Croatian tourism and its successful rapid growth can be found in other areas, such as the Istrian peninsula, which offers high commercial standards of tourism, or the town of Zadar which is more than twice as old as Dubrovnik, and rapidly transformed itself to offer a far higher level of urban sophistication. National parks like Kornati, Plitvice, Krka, and Pakelnica, each offering unique splendor and are located less than two hours drive from each other. The town of Novalje on the island of Pag has become one of the top draws for the international party crowd with Ibixa-like 24 hour partying in one of the many mega clubs at the Zrce beach. The yacht charter industry is one of the largest and most competitive in the world, offering fantastic value, offering the most fantastic holiday experience. These are the real stories of the Croatian experience.

Milan Šangulin

Rick,

I actually agree with this reader. The point he’s making is that you should be cautious not to fixate on one (ugly) aspect of a destination — such as a war — when there’s so much more to the place. I think a similar case could be made about focusing too much on the communist chapter in former Soviet places, like Prague or Hungary or Poland.

Avoiding talk of old wars and communist times just to appease these critics is unreasonable. However, I would encourage you to think beyond these concepts. For example, I find Mostar at least as engaging for its mosques and Turkish houses and diving-off-the-Old Bridge traditions, as for its war damage and improvised cemeteries.

The more I travel in Croatia and Bosnia, the less I think about the war. The more I travel in Eastern Europe, the less I think about communism. There is so much richness of history and culture to learn about in these places, beyond those unfortunate blips on their history. It’s easy to still think of Eastern Europe as “behind the Iron Curtain,” or as the former Yugoslavia as war-torn—but that’s old news, man. As I say in the guidebooks and in my slideshows, people in Croatia think about the war only when a tourist brings it up. You’re doing readers (and the people who live in these places) a disservice to emphasize the negative/provocative factors too much. A solution might be to occasionally complement these weighty articles with a lighter, more tourist-friendly look at the same places (which you have certainly done before, in places like Dubrovnik). You could write a compelling article about Mostar, Dubrovnik, or the Serb parts of Herzegovina without ever mentioning the war.

Hope this helps.

Cameron

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European Flesh and the American Prude

I find that Europeans are, compared to Americans, more comfortable with their bodies and with sex. (In fact, I imagine even bringing up this topic in my blog might offend some Americans.) Thinking through my recent travels, the examples are plentiful.

My Dutch friends had a copy of a graphic, government-produced magazine promoting safe sex on their coffee table. I was sitting on the toilet at an airport in Poland and the cleaning lady asked me to lift my legs so she could sweep. I’ve learned that I can measure the after-dark romantic appeal of scenic pull-outs along Italy’s Amalfi Coast drive by how many used condoms litter the asphalt. Soap ads on huge billboards overlooking major city intersections in Belgium come with lathered-up breasts. The logo of a German friend’s travel guidebook publishing company is a stick figure of a traveler on a tropical paradise islet leaning up against its only palm tree, hands behind his head, reading a book that’s supported by his erect penis. Children play naked in fountains in Norway. A busty porn star is elected to parliament in Italy. Coppertoned grandmothers in the south of France have no tan lines. The student tourist center in Copenhagen welcomes visitors with a bowl of free condoms at the info desk. Accountants in Munich fold their suits neatly on the grass as every inch of their body soaks up the sun while taking a lunch break in the park.

I’m not comfortable with all of it. In Barcelona during a construction industry convention, locals laughed that they had to actually bus in extra prostitutes from France for this gang. I find the crude sexual postcards sold on racks all over the Continent gross, the Benny Hill-style T&A that inundates TV throughout Mediterranean Europe boorish, and the topless models strewn across page two of so many British newspapers insulting to women. And I’ll never forget the time my wife and I had to physically remove the TV from our children’s hotel room in Austria after seeing a couple slamming away on the free channel 7 (and the hotelier looked at us like we were crazy).

Comparisons with America are striking. In our culture, a popular children’s TV host is routed into obscurity after being seen in an adult theater. A pop star dominates the news media for days after revealing a partially obscured breast for a fleeting moment during a football halftime show. During one particularly moralistic time, statues of classical goddesses gracing our nation’s Capitol were robed. And, because my travel show includes naked statues, it actually has to be shown only after 10 p.m. in some American towns.

I’m not saying we should all run around naked and have Playboys lying around in the doctor’s waiting room. But I have a hunch that children raised in America, where sex is “dirty,” are more likely to have problems with sex and their bodies than those in Europe. I suspect there is more violence associated with sex here than there. I have a hunch that the French, who have as many words for a kiss as Eskimos have for snow, enjoy making love more than we Americans do. I like a continent where sexual misconduct won’t doom a politician with anyone other than his family and friends, and where the human body is considered a divine work of art worth admiring openly.

An early edition of my art-for-travelers guidebook featured a camera-toting David— full frontal nudity, Michelangelo-style — on the cover. My publisher said sales reps complained that in more conservative parts of the USA, bookstores were uncomfortable stocking it. A fig leaf would help sales.

When it comes to great art, I don’t like fig leafs. But I proposed, just for fun, that we put a peel-able fig leaf on the cover so people could have the book cover the way they preferred. My publisher said that would be too expensive. I offered to pay half (10 cents per book times 10,000). He went for it, and I had the fun experience of writing “for fig leafs” on a $500 check. Perhaps that needless expense just adds to my wish that Americans were more European in their comfort level with nakedness.

Am I off-base? What’s behind all this, anyway?

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Europeans Work Less.

This summer I hung out with a Greek friend who spent 20 years working in America. Only after he retired and returned to Greece did he realize that not once in all those years did he take a nap. Now that he’s back in Greece, if he’s sleepy in the afternoon, he takes a snooze. It’s got me thinking about how hard Americans work and how that compares with Europe.

United Europe has 400 million people with an annual economy of about 13 trillion dollars. To put that into relative terms, the United States has 300 million people producing about 13 trillion dollars annually. We’ve got the same size economy. They’ve got more people.

You’ll hear American proponents of our system put down the European system with claims that they don’t make as much money as we do. True — with more people generating only the same gross economy, they make less money per person. But Europeans make essentially the same per hour as we do.

I was raised believing there was one good work ethic: you work hard. While we call this the work ethic, it’s actually only awork ethic. Europeans have a different one. They choose to work roughly 25 percent fewer hours and willingly make 25 percent less money. While that may not be good for business — it is good for life. While choosing to work less is part of “family values” in Europe, here in business-friendly America working less is frowned upon…almost subversive.

I’ve got a friend in Seattle who’s evangelical about holidays. He runs a very small movement called Take Back Your Time (www.timeday.org). Its mission: to teach Americans that we’ve got the shortest vacations in the rich world, and it’s getting worse. His movement’s national holiday was just a couple weeks ago — October 24th. That’s because, by their estimates, if we were Europeans working as hard as people do here, October 24th would be the last day we’d have to go to work.

Things are changing, though. With the pressures of globalization, Europe is having to rethink some of its live-more-work-less ideals. I have a theory that in Ireland, sales of Guinness are threatened and the number of pubs are shrinking at the same rate that the number of cafés are increasing, because drinkers of stout are shifting to lagers and drinkers of lager are shifting to coffee. It’s a symptom of our faster-paced, more competitive world.