Help, the Americans Are Coming!
How to experience the adventure of travel in the 21st century.
Today’s post is inspired by my friend who writes
. She’s spent the week attempting to avoid serious scalds while navigating the plumbing of Argentina. Her article, The Secret of Travel, has the subtitle “Vulnerability. That’s the secret.”Reading it brought back memories of those ancient times in Norway when its people still had moonshine-fueled blood in their veins.
The year was 1987 and I had just begun my career in the basement of a five-star hotel at a company that didn’t want to hire me.
The summer season was about to begin. Colleagues who had endured previous summers ranted more than they raved about what would happen when the flagship property in a chain owned by “The Business Man’s” airline was invaded by retired businessmen and their wives on vacation in the country their ancestors came from.
The staff canteen, often a smoke-filled room where front desk clerks compared notes about their nightly escapades in Oslo’s clubs, became a smoke-filled room where horror stories were shared about Americans using breakfast buffets to build brown cheese, ketchup and smoked salmon sandwiches.
The girls dreaded wearing their heavy, wool-skirted “bunads” at the height of summer while dancing for elderly Americans to reinforce the belief that this was how good Norwegian youth spent their leisure time.
Some staff members argued that we should be happy that our hotel would be filled with people from a culture where tipping was common but tipping created tensions in a place where tips were few and far between.
In security, we spent many a day mediating between room attendants, minibar attendants, and supervisors, all claiming that the others had taken tips meant for them.
You’d think bartenders and servers would be pleased with the tip-happy guests, but the bartenders in Summit 21 where the view of the city was unrivalled complained that our American guests would book a table for 12 and spend two hours yapping and snapping pictures while consuming a single G&T and eleven ice waters.
Norwegian hotels are famous for their breakfast buffets. The food cost in summer exploded thanks to American travel writers who encouraged their readers to pack lunches at breakfast.
“Food is expensive in Norway so take what you can from the free breakfast buffet and make your own lunch.”
When encouraging guests to purchase the hotel’s packed lunches instead of stealing food from the buffet, guests whipped out their Rick Steves travel guides to prove to me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. They claimed they were savvy travellers and a lowly security guard had no business telling them what they could and couldn’t do.
All this aside, there were two groups of people who grew more frustrated than others as the summer rolled along. Switchboard operators and the barbers in the shop at the bottom of the steps that led from the lobby to the shopping arcade.
Savvy adventurers knew they would get a better exchange rate in a bank than a hotel when they cashed their travellers’ cheques. When the busloads of septuagenarians rolled into the lobby on a summer afternoon they immediately asked, “Where’s the bank?”. The answer was “It’s down the steps to the left.”
The barber shop was at the bottom of the steps.
“WHERE’S THE BANK?” echoed through the arcade all summer. It was shouted as soon as people stepped off the stairs. A barber would leave their customer and the shop to point the guest toward the bank. It was in full view about fifty-two feet from where they stood.
It was almost worse for the switchboard operators. Some of them would uneasily ask “How many today?”, when they passed the security office as they arrived for the evening shift. We would tell them the number of US tourists scheduled to check in when the busses arrived.
Strangely enough, people from most countries around the world don’t call the switchboard to ask how to flush toilets but 93.7% of our elderly American tourists did.
A lot has happened since 1987. Norway is no longer an emerging market country. Rick Steves modified his views on the ethics of stealing from buffets. TripAdvisor and Reddit were invented to perpetuate the argument about the ethics of stealing from buffets.
One thing hasn’t changed. Hotel companies still employ hundreds of engineers and interior designers whose sole focus is on ensuring that as you travel around the world, no two plumbing fixtures will be the same.
To experience an adrenaline rush adventure on your travels, steer clear of travel guides and Google. Turn all the dials and the handles in the bathroom. Pull the levers. Push the buttons. Test the waters.
Don’t eat or drink anywhere within three blocks of a major tourist attraction. Avoid menus with pictures of the plates. Ask for the special. Eat it and enjoy it. If it turns out to be calf’s kidneys, savour it and pretend it’s a dish of delicate funghi. Take pictures of people and nature instead of your food.
Remember that “Instagramable” is synonymous with inauthentic. If you struggle to find something that reminds you of home, you’re either in the right place or you should have saved your money and stayed where you were.
Happy travels!
Stay safe, Always Care
Here’s a few other travel-inspired substacks I recommend:
Nolan Yuma’s Born Without Borders
Keep Travel Safe - full disclosure, I help write this one!
What makes travel adventurous for you? How do you navigate foreign bathrooms with puzzling plumbing? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
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All of my stories are personal, authentic, and unashamedly enhanced by imperfect memory and literary creativity.
I care so much about hotels and hospitality that my wife and I wrote a book about it, Spin the Bottle Service - Hospitality in the Age of AI.
In addition to writing stories, I love to tell them.
As a multi-award-winning corporate leader in hospitality and global security, captivating keynotes, compelling coaching sessions, and edutaining, motivational workshops are all part of my repertoire.
Email me at paul@alwayscare.ca.
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An outstanding, and all too accurate look at Americans in foreign lands.
(Including Canada, which most Americans don't think is a different country)
This is a great reminder to be kind, ethical, and appreciative wherever we are.
Thanks, Paul. Another terrific chapter.
I was fascinated to read that Rick Steves recommended, basically, stealing from those buffets. But given the potential for waste, was he really wrong?
I don't care for the buffet breakfasts that are practically omnipresent in French hotels now. I just stayed in a Mercure (yesterday) where the breakfast buffet was almost 20 euros.
As always, I negotiated a "café-croissant" for a much lower price.
Recently I stayed in a 3-star French hotel that proposed an interesting formula: get the traditional coffee/croissant/jus d'orange for 6 euros and add a few extras if you want, for example a yogurt for 1 euro, a small plate of cheese for 1 euro, a fried egg for 1 euro and so forth. They explained that they had tried the buffet formula and that it had been catastrophic as far as food waste.